There’s an important moral homily on offer in “The Tears of St. Peter,” the expansive choral masterpiece completed by the Renaissance composer Orlando di Lasso just weeks before his death in 1594. Let us strive, all of us, to reach the end of our lives with nothing on our consciences as grievous as Peter’s denial of Christ.
是否这些都是每个u的确切条款s would use to define the lesson is another story, and in truth a less interesting one. But the depiction of a guilt-ridden demise — consumed by the awareness of a deed that can no longer be undone — is a warning whose urgency anyone, whether Christian or not, can take to heart.
No one, after witnessing St. Peter’s suffering, would wish to wind up like him.
The Los Angeles Master Chorale, a 21-voice ensemble led by Grant Gershon, came to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on Friday, May 17, to deliver this cautionary message in person. From a purely musical perspective, it was a haunting and often beautiful experience.
“The Tears of St. Peter” consists of 21 compact pieces of unaccompanied seven-voice polyphony — 20 madrigals set to Italian poetry by Luigi Tansillo, capped by a Latin motet, “Vide homo” (“See, o man”). The piece stands in a tradition that blurs the conventional boundaries between sacred and secular music, using the Italian vernacular and certain strains of popular music to explore spiritual themes.
Peter’s self-reproach is deeply etched in every line of the poetry, and at the end of a remarkably prolific and inventive creative career, Lasso (also known as Orlande or Roland de Lassus, depending on which corner of Europe he happened to be in) seemed determined to show the full range of what he could do in this arena.
The madrigals are virtuoso showcases of contrapuntal ingenuity, with voices shearing off and recombining in dazzlingly intricate displays. There are robust, full-bodied textures in telling alternation with transparent vocal filigree. Lasso’s attention to the specifics of the poetry — a key component in Renaissance text-setting — is alert and resourceful throughout.
The chorale rose beautifully to the music’s vocal challenges, singing with all the tenderness and care this poignant work demands. The ensemble moved through the various compositional landscapes with all the quickness and agility of a fish swimming upstream.
If this had been simply a concert rendition of “St. Peter,” everything might have been well. But Friday’s performance came cloaked in a regrettable theatrical presentation by director Peter Sellars, one that managed to be negligible and intrusive all at once.
In Sellars’ version, which premiered in Los Angeles in 2016, the singers roam the stage in gently morphing patterns. They make emphatic gestures and give each other consolatory hugs. Sometimes they lie down and then get back up again.
It’s not easy to find the right terminology for this. “Staging” is close, in that the performers are in fact moving around and doing stuff, but that might imply a theatrical vision that is nowhere in evidence. “Choreography” would wrongly suggest an original lexicon of movement (some of the staging does play like a badly cribbed riff on the work of Mark Morris).
The best descriptor for Sellars’ work here, probably, is “mime,” with all of the negative connotations that term implies. Most of the stage work involves adding a layer of numbingly literal physical commentary to a musical setting that needs nothing of the kind.
When the poet invokes a young woman gazing into a mirror, the singers hold one hand up in front of their faces. On any mention of eyes or ears, those organs are helpfully pointed out. Peter’s denial of Christ, repeated three times, is glossed with three fingers in the air.
当然,这是很有帮助的任何观众member who’s never encountered a mirror before, or who gets eyes and ears confused, or who sometimes has trouble remembering whether three is the number before four or the one after it. But on the key matters of faith or guilt or death, Sellars somehow has nothing of importance to say.
The high point of “St. Peter” comes during the 16th madrigal, “O vita troppo rea” (“O life, too guilty”), when the chorus members retire to a ring of chairs arrayed around the stage and simply sing. In the absence of pointless visual and physical chatter, the music suddenly fills the entire hall, and Lasso’s voice — authoritative, crusty and wise — gets a direct channel to each listener’s soul.