The agony and the ecstasy in two sweet voices

Ecstasy and agony are the twin poles of Italian Baroque vocal music. As this fascinating concert from the Ensemble Claudiana reminded us, the gap between the two is often a mere hair’s breadth.

It consisted of vocal duets from the early 17th to the early 18th centuries, performed by the contralto Sonia Prina and the soprano Roberta Invernizzi. Accompanying them were a lute, a harp, and that antique forerunner of the cello, the viola da gamba.

The concert launched with the words “Vorrei baciarti” – “I would like to kiss you” – uttered with tremulous intensity, against an imperiously strummed chord. Instantly, one felt the temperature in the Wigmore Hall shoot up. This ardent declaration opened a duet by the great Claudio Monteverdi. As this concert showed, he and the Italians who came after him could wring maximum intensity from the encounter of two voices.

The singers were superbly alert to all this, making the twists and turns of the emotional journey seem vividly real. In Monteverdi’s Interrotte Speranze (Hopes Cut Short), the poem talks of the lover who sends tributes of tears to his beloved, “to be your trophies and my funeral pyre”. It’s all high-flown nonsense, but when sung as it was here with such a magnificent climax on the word “trophies”, and such a pathetic downward fall on the phrase “funeral pyre” the emotion seemed real. Only Prina’s occasional coarseness of tone marred the evening; Invernizzi was by contrast a model of vocal finesse.

In the later works by Lotti and Durante, and above all in two superb little-known duets by Handel, the singers added impressive, rapid-fire virtuosity to expressivity. There were also some instrumental numbers, particularly the three character pieces for the viola da gamba by Antoine Forqueray, played with melancholy and sprightly energy by Vittorio Ghielmi.

Ensemble Claudiana’s CD Amore e morte dell’amore is out now on Naïve