Reminiscences of Monteverdi's Vespers

It's been a wonderful season of music on BBC Radio 3 for those who, like me, at the moment at least, can't attend their usual fill of London concerts in the flesh but rely on the BBC iPlayer for their musical nourishment (not to mention news, culture, politics, etc.).

First, there were two wonderful concerts from St John's Smith Square with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge and Polyphony: the Corelli Christmas concerto (including a beautiful, yearning Pachelbelesque slow movement I hadn't heard for years and which brought time to a still for a moment), and the first three cantatas of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, and then a moving, spellbinding Messiah on Christmas Eve.  I have listened to the lot on a bright Bogotá day at my desk, with the sunshine streaming through the sitting room window.

The highlight of all, though, was BBC Radio 3's recording of the summer prom which Mum and I attended of Monteverdi's Vespers in the Albert Hall, September 2010.  John Eliot Gardiner conducted the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, with the London Oratory Junior Choir and His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts, the musicians deployed around the vast expanses of the Albert Hall.

The recording on iPlayer has expired, I am afraid, but I am happy to report that the whole performance can be seen on YouTube, beginning with the following excerpt and then going straight through.

Mum queued heroically to get two of the best seats in the Albert Hall on that balmy summer's night in September.  I had stepped off the plane from Colombia that morning.  It was one of the most memorable and moving concerts I have heard, the first time I had heard the Vespers live.  This is surely some of the most otherworldly, seductive, earthy, human, evocative, primal and inspiring music known to man. It pulses to the rhythms of early 17th Century Venice and, as Gardiner convincingly argued in a talk before the performance, is also powerfully redolent of the 'muezzin' and the sounds of Islam.  Close your eyes and think of Baghdad, Marrakech, Damascus...

At one of many heartstopping moments in the Vespers, two sole male voices spiralled and intertwined in invocations to the divine from opposing sides of the Albert Hall, to an awed silence from the 5000 people beneath.

It was wonderful to relive the experience today.  A few photos below. Love to all!