Music Review
LES ARTS FLORISSANTS
Presented by Boston Early Music Festival. At Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, April 24
CAMBRIDGE — It’s been 14 years since the Boston Early Music Festival last presented William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants. Sunday’s program at Sanders Theatre, exquisitely played, sung, and acted, had to make you wonder why.
The conceit of “Serious Airs and Drinking Songs’’ is that the five singers — soprano Emmanuelle de Negri, mezzo Anna Reinhold, tenor Reinoud Van Mechelen, baritone Cyril Auvity, and bass Lisandro Abadie — are a 17th-century troupe about to appear before the French court of Louis XIV. They’re rehearsing Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Italian pastoraletta “Amor vince ogni cosa’’ (“Love Conquers All Things’’); in between, they break into some of the popular songs of the day by Charpentier, Michel Lambert, Étienne Moulinié, and Sébastien Le Camus.
At Sanders, de Negri’s “semi-staging’’ included a coat rack on rollers and a table covered with a red cloth and five wine glasses. The instrumental quintet comprised two violins (Florence Malgoire and Sue-Ying Koang), viola da gamba (Myriam Rignol), theorbo (Thomas Dunford), and Christie at the harpsichord. Surtitles translated the singers’ Italian and French.
The acting was anything but “semi,’’ since the troupe has its own real-life dramas. The mezzo teases all three men before winding up with the tenor. The soprano has a crush on the bass, who seems to be the troupe’s director, but finally accepts the suit of the baritone.
After the first rehearsal section, red wine was poured into the glasses and the vocal quintet broke into Moulinié’s lusty “Amis, enivrons-nous du vin d’Espagne en France’’ (“Friends, let’s get drunk on Spanish wine in France’’). Thereafter the airs were all serious. Reinhold flirted shamelessly in Lambert’s “Vos yeux adorables’’ (“Your adorable eyes’’); de Negri hid behind the bass’s jacket on the coat rack while listening to him sing Moulinié’s “Enfin la beauté que j’adore’’ (“At last the beauty whom I adore’’) in praise of Reinhold. To Lambert’s “J’aimerais souffrir la mort’’ (“I should rather suffer death’’), Abadie directed Van Mechelen in how to caress Reinhold’s cheek; then in a scene from “Amor vince ogni cosa,’’ Abadie directed while de Negri poured out her heartbreak.
The irony of “Amor vince ogni cosa,’’ which is about two shepherds in love with two shepherdesses, is that the tenor is paired with the soprano and the baritone with the mezzo, whereas in the real life of the troupe it’s the other way around. No surprise, then, that in the Sanders finale, Auvity and Van Mechelen went to the “wrong’’ ladies and had to be repositioned by the director. But “Amor vince ogni cosa’’ was a hoot throughout, the studied period poses barely avoiding parody.
The ensemble encored the howling aria where a wolf steals shepherdess Phyllis’s favorite lamb, followed with “Amour du ciel et de la terre’’ from Charpentier’s opera “Les arts florissants’’ — the work that lent Christie’s ensemble its name. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 14 years for its return.
LES ARTS FLORISSANTS
Presented by Boston Early Music Festival. At Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, Cambridge, April 24
Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com.
