300-yr.-old 'premiere' is lively
May 14, 2000
Classical Music Review by Wynne Delacoma
Chicago Sun-Times

One of the great pleasures of a Newberry Consort performance is the confidence the audience has in two sometimes mutually exclusive elements.  not only are they certain of hearing pre-Baroque music performed at the highest technical and intellectual leve.   They can also count on a wildly entertaining evening.

Such was the case Friday night when Mary Springfels' intrepid band presented the American premiere of Alessandro Scarlatti's oratorio "La Giuditta."   Composed around 1700, it retells the biblical tale of Judith, who delivers her people from battlefield defeat by slaying the Assyrian general, Holofernes.  The manuscript was discovered in the 1960's at Cambridge University in England.

In a semi-staged production at the Newberry Library, soloists were soprano Christine Brandes as Judith, countertenor Drew Minter as Judith's savvy nurse and tenor James Ruff as the outmatched Holofernes.  They were accompanied by violinists Elizabeth Blumenstock and Patricia Ahern, violist Melissa Trier Kirk, Springfels on viola da gamba and Barbara Weiss on harpsichord.

Unfortunately, Brandes relied on a printed score for much of the evening.  But she is such a dynamic performer that seeing her turning pages wasn't as distracting as it might have been.  She sang with the bright, clear tonal color, emotional intensity, and penetrating power that make her one of the country's leading early-music specialists.

Minter and Ruff were equally powerful.  Minter's countertenor has a rich, velvety edge, and he was a calm but compelling figure.  Lithe and handsome, Ruff brought romantic frisson to the story.  Confronting Judith's fierce confidence, his initial wariness and ultimate capitulation were entirely believable.

The oratorio itself is a vivid musical portrait.  "La Giuditta" unfolds swiftly.  In several of the arias, Scarlatti stripped the accompaniament to almost a cappella bareness.

As Judith despaired of finding peace amid war, solo string instruments pulsed in lonely desolation.  While she and her nurse lulled Holofernes to sleep in order to slay him, the viola da gamba repeated a low, simple phrase like a mesmerizing lullaby.

Classical review, Newberry Consort at Newberry Library
by John von Rhein
Tribune Music Critic
May 16, 2000

For elite audiences at the noble palaces of 17th and 18th Century Italy, oratorios were sermons in verse and music, couching moral uplift in dramatic narrative.  In these quasi-operas, biblical themes were common and the subjects invariably heroic.   Scratch below their evangelistic facades, however, and you would find enough erotic, violent content to pack'em in at the multiplexes 300 years later; even if the depiction was utterly chaste and stylized.

Such an oratorio is Alessandro Scarlatti's "La Giuditta" (1700), which had its belated American premiere Friday at the Newberry Library, courtesy of the library's resident early-music wizards, the Newberry Consort, under gamba virtuosa Mary Springfels.   This was an event of considerable importance, and Springfels and her colleagues brought it off handsomely.

The second and more modestly scaled of the composers two settings of the apocryphal tale of Judith and Holofernes "La Giuditta" (Judith) calls for three singers and a small ensemble of strings and basso continuo.  The story of how the beautiful Israelite widow Judith defeats the Assyrians by seducing and beheading the enemy general, Holofernes, is told in recitatives and da capo arias.  A veteran opera composer, Scarlatti achieved his most memorable effects by purely musical means, trusting the singers' persuasiveness.

Indeed, soprano Christine Brandes as Judith, countertenor Drew Minter as the Nurse, and tenor James Ruff as Holofernes were in top vocal and musical form.  The singers, wearing suggestions of period costumes, moved on and off a small platform, with the instrumental consort behind the stage.

There is no finer or more stylish American singer in early music performance today than Brandes, a longtime Newberry Consort regular.  Though she sometimes had to rely on the printed music, she sang firmly and sensitively, with remarkabbe musicality and purity of tone.  Her handling of the rapid, florid writing was impeccable.  This Judith was pathetic in misery, tough in resolve, glorious in victory.  She was particularly impressive in her two concluding arias--"Tu che desti," in which Judith exhorted the populace to trust God, as violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock spun exultant ribbons of figuration over the vocal line; and "Di Bettulia, avrai la sorte," in which her voice became a celestial trumpet.

Minter and Ruff had less to sing, but each pulled a plum out of the Scarlattian cake.   The countertenor lulled the villainous Holofernes to sleep with one of Scarlatti's vocal gems, the raptly beautiful "Dormi, o fulmine di guerra," in which the melismatic vocal line drifts over a softly strummed, rocking accompaniment.  Ruff's tenor, pleasing and secure across a wide range, made a splendid showpiece of "Mi combatti," every ornament in place.

The other superb instrumentalists included Patricia Ahern, violin; Melissa Trier Kirk, viola, and Barbara Weiss, harpsichord.