Earthly Delights

A book of madrigals can be many things to many people, from an a cappella anthology of songs likely never intended to comprise a concert performance, to a watershed transition. A case of the latter is Claudio Monteverdi’s famed early 17th-century Fourth Book, which replaced the medieval epoch’s spiritual adherence with a music addressing more terrestrial concerns. (“Movere gli affeti,” as Monteverdi announced the mission: “depicting the passions”).In “The Full Monteverdi,” which plays through Sunday at the Stanley Kaplan Penthouse, the composer’s pivotal work is performed with unerring musicality by early music vocal ensemble I Fagiolini and artistic director Robert Hollingsworth in a production that nudges the risqué and deftly counterbalances the Lincoln Center Festival’s big-house extravaganzas.As conceived by innovative opera director John La Bouchardière, “The Full Monteverdi” becomes a temporal map of desire that’s as cheekily evocative as it is brilliantly attuned to its musical material. No stage is in sight upon entering the Kaplan, and the room is rife with cabaret-style charm: floor-to-ceiling windows gleaming with the Manhattan skyline (performances start at 9 pm); tables for four set with baskets of cheeses, halved figs and strawberries, and red wine. After the audience has been seated, some time elapses in congenial hubbub before women’s voices arise with an organic voluptuousness that sounds at first as if a soundtrack has been patched into the communal conversations. The opening gambit of “The Full Monteverdi” won’t be its last display of theatrical cunning.“What once was warmed a bitter wind now bends / Where joys grew all is bare and nothing sings,” the opening madrigal declares in sumptuous late Renaissance Italian. The former sentiment is discomfortingly in evidence as the ensemble’s six couples (singers paired with silent actors) go through wrenching routines of rejection and attraction familiar from restaurants and lounges everywhere. The line about singing is belied, however, both by I Fagiolini’s vocal control in polyphonic parts that Mr. La Bouchardière refers to as separate roles in simultaneous operas, and by the performers’ motions among the penthouse tables.A casual listener can enjoy Monteverdi’s work as some of the most sublime vocal music ever composed; the more experienced will know the Fourth Book to be as exquisite a set of 20 songs as is out there, and as knowing a depiction of the perils of romance. Published in 1603, a few years before “L’Orfeo” (generally acknowledged as the world’s first great opera), the Fourth Book codified what Monteverdi termed his prima pratica, or first practice, summing up his debt to predecessors such as Palestrina and Gesualdo.Already under public scrutiny in the circles of Catholic music theory for unresolved dissonances and unsanctioned melodic intervals, the composer would respond with 1607’s Dichiaratione (declaration), signed by his brother and “as close to being a modernist manifesto as anything written prior to the 20th century,” in early music authority Peter Laki’s estimation. Monteverdi’s Fifth Book leaped toward modern music, and he’d transform the musical landscape again in his 70s, setting the foundations for Baroque opera with Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria and La coronazione di Poppea.At the Kaplan, “The Full Monteverdi” aimed for less lofty goals, with singers and performers rising abruptly to enact love’s tug of war, intent only upon their partners (and themselves), exchanging crestfallen and petulant looks or huffing toward the exits. Rudimentary familiarity with romance languages proved adequate for lines translating as “bathe my love with tears,” “give me your heart / I live for nothing else,” and the madrigal “Si, ch’iovorreimorire”‘s lusty “Mouth, kisses, tongue — oh, let me die!” House lights remained up throughout, as randy nuzzling broached into fresh protestations. A slap cracked the fraught air and an evening wrap was heaved, while one couple groped avidly against a mirrored pillar near the south windows.Though the miming of lovelorn angst grew redundant, the exquisite interplay of voices easily surmounted the staging’s novelty: A phrase lolled from tenor to baritone to bass, and mezzo and tenor trilled the pace of a rare rapid tempo; bass Giles Underwood lead into one madrigal with astonishingly faint dexterity; and the ensemble concluded a late number with delicious precision before picking up the next with breathtaking, pulse-stilling beauty. By the production’s conclusion, Mr. La Bouchardière’s mute actors stormed off for good, leaving the penthouse to I Fagiolini’s ravished and ravishing singers.Until July 29 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).

Earthly Delights

Earthly Delights

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