It is undoubtedly one of the ensembles that have had the greatest impact on the history of the Festival of Early and Baroque Music in Ambronay: Les Arts Florissants. He was invited on Saturday for this first weekend of the 43rd edition, led by Paul Agnew, who has become co-artistic director. We met the conductor in the morning, when he was getting ready to conduct not one, but two major concerts at the Abbey: Schütz’s madrigals and Bach’s Weimar cantatas. Story of a day with Paul Agnew.
In the cloister of the Abbey of Ambronay or in the corridors of the old conventual buildings where all kinds of baroque instruments resonate, the Scotsman Paul Agnew is a bit at home. He has been attending the festival for more than twenty-five years, first as a tenor, singing for various ensembles, then as a conductor. “The first concert had to be a Purcell”, he tells us hesitantly. But if the memories lose some clarity, the emotion is the same. “Ambronay represents many things”he launches, becoming animated immediately.
Pell-mell he advances “the incredible atmosphere, the beauty of the place, the enormous educational effort”he said, “because I also directed the Academy there”. But above all, Paul Agnew tells us, there is this public: “loyal, intelligent, experienced, and looking forward, I think, to the arrival of the festival and the concerts. Coming here is like joining a gigantic family. And it’s a joy to build this relationship. It’s that’s why I like to address the audience, explain the idea of our presentations so that they can listen with another ear”.
And when the time comes, at 3 p.m. on the stage of the abbey church, Paul Agnew takes his time to tell, as in a stand-up. “Heinrich Schütz is a young German from the very beginning of the 17th century who arrives from the city of Kassel and wants to go to Italy to advance in music, while his parents want him to do law… My mother didn’t want either not that I’m a singer!”. The public, amused, remains very receptive.
“Thanks to a patron, Schütz travels to Italy to learn how to compose for real”poursuit Agnew. “And between 1609 and 1612, so in a very short period of time, he managed to understand this new language with incredible depth. It was a real change of world! The madrigals (sung poems, editor’s note) that he wrote during this stay are so good that they can be compared to the 3rd or 4th book of Monteverdi’s madrigals, which are the reference for the time”, he explains. Expert words.
Sung as they should be a cappella, the madrigals – all in five voices, except two to eight voices – hit their target immediately. Because the polyphonies, very sophisticated, go straight to the affects (and that’s the influence of the Italian language), carried by the grace of Les Arts Florissants.
So this magnificent madrigal Injury wounds (Hurt yourself wounds), where we hope that “tongues be arrows and kisses wounds”. Or this other one, She greets me (She greets me), where the cruel woman “in her sweet reverence, hide from my eyes her charming eyes and her divine countenance”. And the whole palette of amorous feeling passes through it – dream, spite, cruelty, jealousy, loneliness, death of love (very recurrent theme) – under the pen of the two main poets used, Giambattista Marino and Battista Guarini .
Paul Agnew’s second program, for the 8:30 p.m. concert, is this time dedicated to Bach. “It was important for me to associate Schütz and Bach in the same day”Paul Agnew explained to us, “because there is a real link between the two, despite the hundred years that separate them, Schütz was born in 1585, Bach in 1685. The influence of Schütz, and especially of the Italian music he assimilated, on all his compatriots afterwards, of which Johann Sebastian Bach is absolutely enormous”he asserts with conviction. “Without Schütz, Bach’s music would be different”.
Paul Agnew has chosen four of Bach’s cantatas composed at a specific time, during his stay in Weimar. Because our conductor undertook with this new cycle to follow the composer throughout his life and that’s where he went after the works of his youth. At the court of Weimar, explains Paul Agnew, Bach was not yet the Cantor of Leipzig endowed with a large orchestra and a choir. “He has fourteen musicians (but not all of them were necessarily available at the same time…), with whom you have to make extremely ambitious music. But Bach has an unlimited imagination!”.
And as in the previous concert, Agnew works on stage to dissertate with passion on Bach and on his private life from 1714, on his first wife Maria Barbara and their seven children. “All of this has an impact on his artistic life”, he says. Above all, the Weimar cantatas offer texts other than those of Luther. Poems, mostly signed by the court poet Salomo Franck, which offer Bach another horizon “to express himself, his deep faith, his knowledge too”.
So for example the cantata crying, lamenting, worrying, hesitating, (Tears, lamentations, torments and discouragement) which describes the affliction of Christians following the announcement by Christ of his own death. Heartbreaking, his choir cry laments and the first air for countertenor (here the impressive Maarten Engeltjes) and oboe (Neven Lesage, also very convincing) carries the public away.
Before the last cantata, Come, savior of the heathen (Come now savior of the heathen), Paul Agnew once again addresses the public to “fully appreciates its magnificent French-style opening”. An overture, he explains, is music written on the occasion of the coming of a king. Lully’s France had Louis XIV. Bach’s Germany having no king, it was for Christ that he wrote it. Pirouette of great art.