Vivaldi and Bach settings inspire at Schuller’s lead

Gunther Schuller conducted the music of Vivaldi and Bach at the Northwest Bach Festival on Friday at St. John’s Cathedral in Spokane. It was a trip to genius and beyond.

The cathedral itself was in something of disarray with about a third of the pews removed for the installation of new stained glass windows. The remaining seats, though, were full.

Friday’s concert opened with Antonio Vivaldi’s “Dixit Dominus” (RV 595), one of the Italian master’s two settings of Vulgate Psalm 109 (110 in the King James Bible). Schuller admitted in an interview last week that he had ignored Vivaldi in past years of the festival, which has included all sorts of other baroque composers besides Bach.

“I find he wrote a lot of ‘wallpaper music,’ but every once in a while there’s, ‘Wow!’ ” Schuller said.

“Dixit Dominus” is one of those “wows,” and showed a side of Vivaldi that those who know him only as the composer of the “Four Seasons” have missed, namely that he was a genius composer of vocal music. Musicologist Jane Ellsworth told the audience before the performance that Vivaldi wrote more than 40 operas and many other vocal works, both secular and sacred. That experience showed in “Dixit Dominus.”

The text is full of militant – even violent – imagery, but Vivaldi’s music is gracefully, though demandingly, operatic. Schuller’s approach gave the work a lightness that seemed more suited to a Vespers service, as Vivaldi obviously intended, than an evening of threats and skull crushing at the opera. The Lord’s pronouncement that “I will make your enemies your footstool,” for instance, was insistent rather than pounding.

The orchestral playing and choral singing, too, were light and clear. And the five soloists – sopranos Jane Brown and Kendra Colton, mezzo soprano Barbara Rearick, tenor Riceland Osgood and bass Donald Wilkinson – would have been quite at home in any baroque opera production.

After intermission, Schuller returned to Johann Sebastian Bach and his “Magnificat,” and the audience was taken into a world beyond genius.

Like Vivaldi’s “Dixit Dominus,” Bach’s “Magnificat” was intended for a Vespers service. Its text is Mary’s song of praise from Luke’s Gospel. Bach’s handling of the Virgin’s shifting mood, through instrumentation and choices of solo voices, was a musical world away from Vivaldi’s mere genius.

The contrast between Colton’s earthier soprano in “My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior” and Brown’s more vulnerable sound in the next aria, “For He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden,” with Keith Thomas’ plaintive oboe d’amore obbligato, showed Bach’s command of subtle characterization. So did Rearick’s “He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich He has sent away empty.”

Schuller and his forces brought exceptional transparency to Bach’s complex textures and adventurous harmonies as well as to Vivaldi’s florid, operatic style. The two works combined for a short but beautiful evening.