By Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times
October 19, 2008
Night can be a touchy topic for Chicagoans in mid-October. The promise of warm summer daylight until 9 p.m. is long gone. Ahead looms the unwelcome specter of cold, blustery dusk settling in at 4:30 p.m.
But Music of the Baroque decided to risk a little seasonal melancholy Friday in the Harris Theater, offering a sumptuous sampling of music of the night by composers ranging from Henry Purcell to Benjamin Britten. Thanks to an ingenious mix of the familiar (Mozart's "Eine kleine Nachtmusik," the Nocturne from Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream") and the unfamiliar, the risk paid off handsomely.
The concert had its sprightly moments. "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" sounded brisk and fresh under Jane Glover's baton, no easy feat for a work that has popped up on everything from cell phone ring tones to TV commercials. Haydn's Symphony No. 8
in G Major ("Le Soir"), which opened the concert, was airy and transparent as well as
a subtly crafted showcase for some of Music of the Baroque's outstanding
principal players.
But the music that lingered in the ear long after the final applause had a darker cast, creating an atmosphere that was mesmerizing, at times hallucinatory. Britten's Nocturne, Op. 60, set to eight texts by poets including Shelley, Wilfred Owen, Keats and Wordsworth, summoned up gentle ghosts and amiable crickets as well as murdered humanity and raging sea monsters. Soloist John McVeigh rode its shifting moods with a warm, dark-hued tenor. Britten's music flowed seamlessly from one text to the next, moving from a shadowy, dissonant undercurrent in an excerpt from Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" to ecstatic outbursts in Shakespeare’s Sonnet XLIII.
In "Total Eclipse" from Handel's oratorio "Samson," McVeigh conveyed both sadness and a sense of quiet outrage in the blinded hero's lament.
Like Britten's Nocturne, the Night Sequence from Purcell's "The Fairy Queen" is rarely heard but was richly rewarding Friday night. MOB assembled a fine team of vocal soloists—sopranos Alyssa Bennett and Amy Conn, countertenor Ryan Belongie and bass-baritone Peter Van De Graaff.
In the final section, Van De Graaff—eventually joined by the other singers—
summoned sleep with hushed tones. The silences that punctuated the brief phrases turned the song into an incantation.
