MusicAeterna and Dmitry Sinkovsky performed “Seven Words” by Haydn

Haydn’s oratorio “The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross” was performed in the St. Petersburg Hall of the Academic Chapel. Haydn’s spiritual opus, rarely heard in Russia, was performed by conductor Dmitry Sinkovsky together with the MusicAeterna orchestra and choir and four soloists. Tells Gulara Sadikh-zade.

Dmitry Sinkovsky, a famous conductor, baroque violinist and singer, a specialist in historically informed performance, whose history includes the founding and leadership of the baroque ensemble La Voce Strumentale and successful collaboration with singer Yulia Lezhneva, is consistently and persistently expanding his repertoire. After being appointed chief conductor of the Nizhny Novgorod Opera House last year, he successfully staged Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice there, and last summer, in cooperation with the Diaghilev Festival, staged Handel’s early oratorio The Triumph of Time and Disappointment. Collaboration with the MusicAeterna team has become regular and has already brought tangible results: at the beginning of the year, Sinkovsky performed with them “Magnificat” by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach and “Coronation Mass” by Mozart.

Large oratorio works undoubtedly encourage large-scale musical thinking: this is no longer a baroque ensemble performing concerti grossi and accompanying arias. This requires a sense of large, extended, complex form, the ability to build the dramaturgy of a composition – and Sinkovsky follows this path quite confidently.

Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross” is a rarity that you rarely hear in our latitudes. And in addition, it is a rare case in the history of music when a composition exists in several versions: with and without text.

First, in 1785, he responded to the request of Canon Don José Saenz de Santa Maria, rector of the Church of Santa Cueva in Cadiz, to write seven orchestral pieces to be performed on Good Friday. The notorious “seven words” are seven phrases that, according to all four evangelists, Christ said before his death: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”; “Truly I say, today you will be with me in paradise” (words addressed to the repentant thief); “Woman, behold your son; behold your mother”; “God, God, why have you forsaken me?” “I’m thirsty”; “It is finished!”; “Father, I commit My spirit into your hands.” The intended ritual was as follows: the bishop would pronounce one phrase, and a sermon would follow with a brief explanation of the meaning of the words. Then the bishop left the pulpit and knelt before the altar; everyone immersed themselves in prayer – a kind of meditation on a given topic. At this moment the corresponding piece (“sonata”) was supposed to sound. Thus, Haydn’s seven “sonatas” are seven musical illustrations of prayerful states associated with the words of Christ, and the illustrations are purely instrumental.

Immediately after Haydn completed the order, the leaders of the Artaria publishing house, with which the composer collaborated until 1800, asked him to create a version for a string quartet: in the conditions of Vienna at the time, where home music playing was a widespread hobby, it was precisely such arrangements that were in particular demand ; For the same purpose – wide distribution and successful sales – a piano transcription was created, verified by Haydn.

But then, under even more curious circumstances, an oratorio version arose. In 1794, returning from his second trip to London, where Haydn was literally carried in his arms and showered with orders, he stopped in the town of Passau on the Danube. And there, one Sunday in a local church, I heard a choral version of his own orchestral suite, which was made by the local bandmaster Joseph Fribert: for the oratorio, he reworked the text of the poem by the German poet Karl Wilhelm Ramler “The Death of Jesus”, who “translated” quotations from the Gospel into poetic language of that time with all its banal idioms. Haydn liked the idea of ​​choral transcription, although he said of Friebert’s work: “I probably could have done the vocal parts better.” Returning to Vienna, he asked an influential and enlightened nobleman, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, to revise the text, making it more expressive. It was with “Seven Words” that Haydn began his collaboration with the baron, who later created the libretto for Haydn’s two great oratorios, “The Creation of the World” (1798) and “The Seasons” (1801).

Having abolished the recitatives of the bass, which pronounced the words of Christ before each part of the oratorio in Fribert’s version, Haydn entrusted them to the choir – as if in the form of an epigraph to each part. And then he fused the choral sound into the orchestral fabric, preserving the suite’s score almost in its original form, only slightly changing the composition of the wind instruments. The most important innovation is that another part has appeared in the oratorio: between the IV and V sonatas, a strict and sublime wind chorale sounds.

The orchestra and choir of MusicAeterna shone that evening: the incredible teamwork of the instrumentalists and the singing quality of the choir – by these rare qualities today you can recognize them even with your eyes closed. Dense, thick, rich sound of the strings, exalted bursts of the choir, a wonderful sounding quartet of soloists – although, judging by the Hamburg score, sopranist Elizaveta Sveshnikova should not have raised her intonation so clearly, and bass Viktor Pogudin would have liked a more saturated sound. The conductor, as they say, “held the nerve” of the music and did not let go. A pulsating, elastic, purely baroque drive is, perhaps, not exactly what Haydn had in mind, but Sinkovsky “heard so” and did not tire of spurring the orchestra until the very finale – the dramatic “Terremoto”, a musical picture of the earthquake that happened, according to the gospel text, at the very moment when Christ gave up his spirit.

It is worth noting here that the Introduction and all seven “sonatas” – the seven main parts of the oratorio are still called that way – are kept at a very slow tempo: adagio, largo, grave, Llento. And only in “Terremoto” does the orchestra suddenly break into presto – a very fast tempo, and even with sharp accents, tremolo and all the techniques used to intimidate, depicting a cataclysm. In the finale there comes a dramatic denouement to a generally calm and, oddly enough, rather light-colored cycle. Despite the succession of slow movements, the composer managed to avoid monotony due to a radically structured tonal plan and a variety of interpretations of the early sonata form.

But the main thing that makes “Seven Words” a masterpiece of Haydn’s late style is the subtlety of nuance, gradations of the emotional spectrum, from deep sorrow to pure, unclouded joy, ringing and light. There is a surprising amount of major in this tragic work; Moreover, in the Introduction, in the IV and VII sonatas, a certain subtle hint of danceability appears: sometimes a minuet, sometimes a sarabande appears.

This lightness, transparency, emotional flexibility and dynamic gradations were slightly lacking in Sinkovsky’s interpretation. His enthusiasm played a bad joke on him: he was too carried away with the forte, probably trying to impress the audience so as not to get bored. And the forte was monotonous in intensity, although there are many shades in the forte range. So the performance turned out to be bright, noisy and spectacular – but still to the detriment of the depth and expressiveness of the meanings that Haydn put into his score.