Harvard University Choir

Monteverdi's Vespers, published in 1610 as a group of items in a collection of miscellany, are unified both liturgically and musically. Yet they have all the variety and color of a patchwork quilt. The fact that the University Choir chose to perform them in St. Paul's Catholic Church in its fall concert Sunday night contributed to making the piece a spectacle. The Vespers form a very complex whole--they consist of a response, five psalms, a hymn, and the Magnificat, together with corresponding plainsong melodies which precede and follow each movement except the hymn. In addition, each of the eight movements is rhythmically heterogeneous, as if each voice part had its own time signature, and even that changed every measure or two.

On the whole, Conductor John Ferris and his choir succeeded in bringing coherence out of this complexity, primarily by maintaining a consistently high level of precision. The choir's tone was excellently blended, and its diction surprisingly good. St. Paul's Men's Schola provided the plainsong from the balcony, to the great advantage of the total effort.

The Vespers are colorful and spectacular primarily because of the constant shifts of performing forces: soloists come in and go out, winds alternate with strings, and the chorus parts shift abruptly from one end of the voice ranges to the other. Therefore co-ordination and flexibility among the various performing groups are essential to a good performance. The soloists were all successful in this respect, making the most florid passages sound simple. Penny Colwell and Marian Ruhl sang their soprano duets like a single voice, and bass Walter Moore's competence and ease were overwhelming. In some of the tenor and bass duets, there was a lag of a few measures before the voices attained complete raport.

The instrumentalists were equally outstanding. The string section was rich and sparkling, with the violins producing elegant duet passages in the Magnificat. The strings contribute warmth, but most of the color came from the wind section, a combination of two oboes, English horn, bassoon, and trombone. Lisa Crawford's organ part was solid, even though her choice of registrations in the hymn made the accompaniment too prominent.

It was a disappointment to have the two choruses stand together, when some separation would have added to both the pageantry of the occasion and the musical distinctness of the two choruses. Many passages in the Vespers depend on the juxtaposition of the choruses and on a dialogue between them which can not be totally convincing with the two choruses right next to each other. Also, the psalm tune in the Nisi Dominus was disappointingly inaudible. But these are among a very small group of disappointments in what was in every respect a tasteful and powerful performance, particularly impressive in the freedom from meter that the choir attained.