Musical Events FEBRUARY 9, 2015 ISSUE

Eyes and EarsAt the Metropolitan Museum, early music in the galleries.

BY ALEX ROSS

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TWorks by seventeenth-century female composers wereperformed amid Caravaggios.ILLUSTRATION BY RICCARDO VECCHIO

he sixteenth-century art historianGiorgio Vasari describes a picture byFra Bartolomeo—“The MysticMarriage of St. Catherine,” at the Pitti

Palace—in which two child angels are seenplaying stringed instruments. One of them, Vasari writes, is a lutenist painted“with a leg drawn up and his instrument resting upon it, and with the handstouching the strings in the act of running over them, an ear intent on theharmony, the head upraised, and the mouth slightly open, in such a way thatwhoever beholds him cannot persuade himself that he should not also hear thevoice.”

The idea that music can somehow reverberate from the flat, dumb surface of apainting is a recurring conceit of art history, whether in the angel concerts of theRenaissance or in the abstract syncopation of Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie.” Likewise, concertgoers have often perceived images in the invisiblefabric of sound. As the historian Therese Dolan observes, Charles Baudelaireexhibited both kinds of synesthesia, listening to paintings by Delacroix (“Theadmirable chords of his color often make one dream of harmony and melody”)and gazing upon the orchestral music of Wagner (“an immense horizon and awide diffusion of light”). The urge to draw upon another sense is especiallystrong when an artist takes a turn into new terrain: Schoenberg spoke of“tone-color melody,” Kandinsky of visual symphonies emerging from cacophony.

In the past few years, the music series at the Metropolitan Museum, under theimaginative leadership of Limor Tomer, has been stressing the link betweensound and image, staging concerts not only in the museum’s auditorium but alsoin the galleries. John Zorn has played sax in front of Jackson Pollock’s “AutumnRhythm”; the Ming Dynasty opera “The Peony Pavilion” has unfolded inBrooke Astor’s Chinese garden; and the Grand Tour, a vital new ritual, hashosted early-music ensembles in galleries relevant to their repertory. Last season,the Dark Horse Consort performed music of the Low Countries under thewide, sad, searching eyes of Rembrandt, who seemed ready if not to sing alongthen to deliver an approving grunt. To hear music in the presence of suchmasterpieces not only brings out the musical in the visual, and vice versa; itcreates imaginary communities in which figures from disparate art forms move

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Tinto the same plane, dancing in the mind’s eye.

he highlight of this season’s Grand Tour was a performance by thevocal ensemble TENET, one of the city’s liveliest and busiestearly-music groups. The setting was Gallery 621, which featuresCaravaggio and like-minded artists. The room is dominated by sombre

classical and religious scenes: the self-flagellation of St. Dominic, by Tarchiani;the Dormition of the Virgin, by Saraceni; a tense exchange between Sts. Peterand Paul, by Ribera; and, most memorable, Caravaggio’s naturalistic imaginingof Peter’s denial of Christ, in which the saint looks befuddled and his accusertriumphant. There are no musical references in this gallery of pictures, at least inits current configuration. (An exhibition in a neighboring gallery, entitled“Painting Music in the Age of Caravaggio,” displays Caravaggio’s mischievousearly canvas “The Musicians,” in which a trio of scantily clad neo-Grecianyouths tune their instruments and study a score while a Cupid figure busieshimself with a bunch of grapes.) Instead, the music of Gallery 621 is largely oneof color: the red of Paul’s tunic, in the Ribera, emerges from a dark backgroundlike a tone from silence.

Members of TENET—the sopranos Jolle Greenleaf and Molly Quinn, themezzo Virginia Warnken, the viola da gamba player Joshua Lee, the theorboand guitar player Hank Heijink, and the harpsichordist Jeffrey Grossman—offered exuberant, subversive counterpoint to the prevailing gloom. Theprogram included three pieces by female composers of the seventeenth century:Francesca Caccini, the daughter of Giulio Caccini, one of the pioneers of theopera genre; and Barbara Strozzi, whose adoptive father, the poet GiulioStrozzi, collaborated with several early opera composers. The two womenmanaged to carve out distinct identities within a nearly all-male composingculture, their finest arias rivalling those of Monteverdi and Cavalli. The Met’sgalleries are also a male-dominated realm, and TENET seemed to be giving slyvoice to all the silent Madonnas on the museum’s walls.

Strozzi, a remarkably prolific and well-documented composer who moved inlofty intellectual circles in Venice, was represented by “Amor dormiglione,” inwhich the singer berates Cupid for sleeping through hours that could have beendedicated to lovemaking. Vasari once explained that painters show Cupid in thevicinity of musicians because “Love is always in the company of Music”;Strozzi’s piece could almost be an ironic commentary on that familiarconfiguration, with the eager lover in distress because the fuel of music isrunning low. Greenleaf, who is the leader of TENET and also coördinated theGrand Tour project, sang in a crisp, sensuous voice, and, in an amusing bit oftheatre, tugged at Heijink’s sleeve as she complained of wasted time. I only wishthat we could have heard, by way of contrast, one of Strozzi’s stately,high-minded laments, such as “Lagrime mie” or “L’Eraclito amoroso.” But theGrand Tour ensembles were on a tight schedule, and had about twenty minuteseach.

TENET then turned to Caccini, who spent much of her career in the service ofthe Medici. The canzonetta “Chi desia di saper” has words by Michelangelo

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Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and hebecame the magazine’s music critic in 1996.

Buonarroti the Younger, the artist’s grand-nephew: over a bouncy beatstrummed out on a Spanish guitar (as Caccini’s score requests), the singercheekily proclaims that love is nothing but pain, fear, and fury. Quinn, thesoloist, accentuated the pop flavor with handclaps and tasteful gyrations.Warnken, a bright-voiced mezzo, then delivered a richly ornamented renditionof Caccini’s “Dispiegate guancie amate,” a melancholy, sinuous song ofseduction. The ornaments in the first verse were, in fact, Caccini’s own; a singerof rare finesse, she was as precise in her instructions as notation of the periodallowed. The program also included two arias by Luigi Rossi and a “Passacallidella Vita,” or “Passacaglia of Life,” by an anonymous seventeenth-centurycomposer. The last made for a rollicking, foot-tapping finale, with the singersstrutting about, arm in arm. I would happily have followed them around themuseum for another couple of hours. (Fortunately, TENET is expanding thismaterial into an evening-length entertainment, titled “The Secret Lover,” whichcelebrates the crucial contributions that women made to the emergence of opera.Before the début of the full program, in April, at the Edith Fabbri Mansion, onEast Ninety-fifth Street, the group will delve into the profound male woe ofBach’s St. Matthew Passion and Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsoria.)

Other participants in the Grand Tour included Ensemble Viscera, performingSpanish and Italian lute-and-guitar pieces in an El Greco gallery; theharpsichordist Michael Sponseller, playing mostly eighteenth-century works,including the London-based composers J. C. Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel,amid English paintings of the same period; and the wind band Ciaramella,presenting Dutch fare in the vicinity of landscapes and maritime scenes by thelikes of Aelbert Cuyp and Philips Koninck. None found quite as deft a fit asTENET did in the Caravaggio room: Ensemble Viscera’s gentle vamps couldn’tcompete with the flamboyant mysticism of El Greco, and Ciaramella’s reedy din,which included bagpipes and shawms, seemed to overpower the Dutch artists’calm seas and drifting clouds. Still, each mini-concert brought unexpectedepiphanies—Ciaramella made you think about all the noise and bustle that can’tbe perceived in paintings of rustic scenes—and together the performancesprovided a vivid cross-section of current early-music practice, which tends toprize tangy timbres and springy rhythms.

Throughout the evening, I couldn’t escape the uncanny feeling that the peoplein the paintings were listening in, as in some spooky Victorian tale of portraitscome to life. In the presence of the music, their eyes possibly glowed a littlebrighter, their flesh a little warmer. In Gallery 621, the effect was all but electric:chaste religious figures seemed on the verge of jumping out of the chiaroscuroshadows and joining the women of TENET, who, in turn, looked ready to stepthrough the frames into the other world. Then, with the applause, the spell wasbroken: the living walked away, and the pictures fell silent for the night. ♦

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