To close its season this year, If Opera presented this intimate, but still dramatic, pairing of two 17th century vocal works, sacred and secular side by side. Carissimi’s Historia Jonae is one of a series of oratorios he composed for a church in Rome, sometime around the 1640s, pioneering that form of religious music drama without staged action. In this case, the story of the Old Testament prophet Jonah is related, turning theologically upon his confident remonstrance to God to exercise mercy upon him in the belly of the whale, before he preaches to the wicked people of Nineveh. Joseph Doody gave a resolved, defiant account of that prayer, giving the prophet’s words an arresting authority that contrasted effectively with the varied colours of the different voices among which the role of the Narrator is distributed by Carissimi. In ensemble they came together thrillingly for the clamorous, swirling chords given in antiphonal exchange to depict the storms which lead to Jonah being cast from the boat that is caught up in them. The concluding chorus of all the singers as the repenting Ninevites swelled in an edifice of prayerful sincerity.
Although earlier by around two decades, Monteverdi’s operatic scena Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) sounds the more strikingly modern. The instrumental ensemble ZAREKtrio (with additional performers) marked that difference between their rigorous, solid approach to the Carissimi, and the more vibrantly nuanced characterisation of the music for the Monteverdi, not simply accompaniment but certainly part of action in the hands of music director Oliver John Ruthven, leading from the harpsichord. The delicate, yearning introduction on the strings presaged a more human, emotional narrative, setting the episode from Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata in which the lovers Tancredi and Clorinda take up combat against each other anonymously, and their identity is only revealed after Tancredi has fatally wounded Clorinda. A volatile series of musical episodes followed from the performers which structured the drama grippingly, without straining for effect for its own sake.
It was staged effectively by Monica Nicolaides, the duel between the warring pair cast alternately as a fencing match down the central aisle of the small church at Wingfield, and as a tug-of-war. Since the work appears to have been premiered as part of the carnival festivities of 1624 at a Venetian palace, the combatants wore masquerade masks to conceal their identities. Doody presided from the pulpit as the narrator, maintaining an objective distance in his musical projection, with an occasional reflectiveness in some lines to emphasise the scene’s tragedy. Kieran Rayner and Lucky Knight were the hot-tempered protagonists, though Knight gave the final line with rapturous serenity, as the soul of Clorinda rises to heaven after her baptism. These were bold performances of a vivid pair of compositions.
