Marcello: Psalms of David

Fuoco e Cenere, Jay Bernfeld, Rinat Shaham

Paru le 01/11/2004 chez ATMA Classique
Artistes principaux : Fuoco e Cenere Jay Bernfeld Rinat Shaham
Genre : Classique

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King David, soldier and poet, was for centuries a figure as attractive to musicians as to artists like the one who sculpted the big unclothed guy in Florence's Uffizi galleries. Benedetto Marcello's settings of the Psalms of David, part of a large collection called the Estro poetico-armonico, were famous during his own lifetime (1686-1739) and beyond, but have been strangely neglected in recent years even as more obscure Baroque repertories have flourished. When they are heard, it is usually because of their exotic Jewish component. Marcello, a Venetian aristocrat and financial official, was also something of an early ethnomusicologist; he notated chants and songs of Venetian Jews, and inserted intonations of psalm verses, in Hebrew, as freestanding movements or interludes into these settings. (The Jews, in turn, spread Marcello's works all over Europe.) Marcello handles these beautifully. In the three psalms presented on this disc, they come respectively at the beginning, near the end, and in the middle as an introduction to a key aria. The notes by conductor Jay Bernfield blame musicological questions about the authenticity of some of Marcello's other works for the decline in popularity of these psalms, but it would be surprising, given the German roots of musical scholarship, if anti-Semitism did not play some role.
Almost as surprising as the Hebrew language is the direct, contemporary Italian used in the main portions of the psalm settings -- many works of this type were in Latin. Marcello's works form something of an intimate Italian counterpart to Heinrich Schütz's German Psalmen Davids. His settings, for soprano and a continuo featuring a combination of harp and lute that appears in paintings of David, are neither operatic nor oratorio-like. They are formally loose and follow the sense of the text in a flexible way; many of the sections marked "aria" are slow, expressive, arioso-like conceptions; sample track 25, with its repetition of the words "sei la sola meta e immortale oggetto" (You are the only goal and immortal object [of worship]") for an idea of the power of Marcello's style. Israeli-born soprano Rinat Shaham is an ideal interpreter of this music, not only because of her religious background but also because of her medium-sized voice that adapts itself nicely to the free, expressive qualities of this music. A full set of Marcello's 50 psalms by these same forces would be both artistically desirable and commercially successful.

© TiVo

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Marcello: Psalms of David

Fuoco e Cenere

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