Prolific and popular during his short and violently-cut-short life, Italian composer Alessandro Stradella (1643–1682) may not be as familiar to lovers of Baroque music today as some of his contemporaries. A sparkling new recording of his Biblical oratorio Ester: Liberatrice del Popolo Ebreo (Esther, Liberator of the Hebrew People) may help change that. Out now on Navona Records, this release, in the words of Early Music America’s Ian Pomerantz, “should be considered the seminal recording of the work.”
Soprano Jessica Gould, who sings the title role, and whose Salon Sanctuary Concerts was central to producing the two-CD set, spoke with me via email about the oratorio, how the recording came about, and the challenges and rewards of producing and performing in this wonderful and relatively little-known work.
First off, how did you discover this oratorio? Had you performed other music by Stradella?
I am deeply fond of Roman baroque music, having performed a fair amount of it, including Stradella. While doing some research into Baroque Roman composers, I came across the Ester title. When looking up the performance history, I was surprised to find that history to be very scanty and decided to do something about it.
You’ve talked about how Italian artists and composers of the time co-opted the stories of Old Testament heroines as prefigurations of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic Church, and about how the actual stories resonate in our time as well. In the liner notes you also discuss various ways Jewish thinkers have interpreted the biblical story of Esther, which notably, unlike Lelio Orsini’s libretto, has no mention of God. Do you yourself have a preferred interpretation?
My co-author and esteemed colleague Eugenio Refini, chair of the Italian Department of NYU, contributed the portion of the liner notes that discusses the appropriation of Esther by Catholics as a prefiguration of the Virgin Mary. He wrote this section in answer to my question within the essay as to why a Jewish heroine should be such a favored subject to Catholic ecclesiastical audiences during the dark times of the Inquisition.
With regard to the centuries of Jewish commentary on the Book of Esther and the many interpretations of her story that crop up with each new era, I don’t think having a “favorite” interpretation figures into the picture for me. Rather, I find Esther’s shape-shifting through the ages deeply fascinating – how she becomes a tabula rasa to mean different things to different people in different contexts.
Given my particular gender, time, and place, the interpretation that resonates with me the most is the figure of a profoundly intelligent woman in a leadership position, whose only line of defense against the impending catastrophe of a psychopathic wannabe dictator is her own intelligence. That her intellect leads her to triumph, I think, has great resonance for many women (and others) who have traditionally been underestimated, and for the legions of us who value brains over brawn, strategy over violence, and order over chaos.
Stradella was a troublemaker whose life was cut short by murder. It reminded me of the life of Benvenuto Cellini. Yet he was very prolific, and famous and influential in his day. What was his place in the progression of Baroque music? In what ways was he an innovator?
Stradella’s instinct for provocation, which undermined him in life, served him in art. He was an uncompromising boundary pusher, clearly not content to simply write pretty music and deposit the check.
His gift for musical portraiture allowed him to create characters of unusual depth and complexity which go beyond the stock characterizations that would satisfy lesser composers of his time – and he refuses to tone anything down in order to make it more singable (which may be why his works don’t get performed as much as they deserve).
Meaning in Music
Just taking Ester as an example, we immediately understand the gravitas, conflict, and seriousness of purpose of the title character because the majority of her music involves long lines and larger musical phrases. On the other hand, the sparkling quicksilver coloratura Speranza Celeste [Heavenly Hope, an allegorical character inserted into the story by Stradella’s librettist Lelio Orsini] tells us that she is a nonhuman creature of the celestial realm.
As for Aman (Haman), we know he is a psychopath because so often, his runs make no sense; They take unexpected twists and turns, they go on longer than you would expect, and because of this, they keep us on our toes and make us edgy rather than satisfied as we listen.
While countless composers of the time are writing pretty music, they lack this kind of x-ray vision into character that Stradella has in abundance, and that will lead down the line to the wonderfully multifaceted characters of middle and late-period Verdi.
For you as an artist, were there particular challenges in learning and performing the role of Ester? Particular rewards?
There were challenges and rewards in abundance. From my point of view, the challenge of Stradella’s Ester is to successfully embody strength and vulnerability in equal measure. She is a queen, but she is keenly aware that her predecessor was ousted for being too outspoken and that the same fate could easily befall her. She has great intellectual capacity, but she doesn’t know it until it is put to the test. She has the choice to save herself and live in luxury while her people die, or potentially lose her own life in order to save them by admitting her true [Jewish] identity. She must don a cloak of meekness in order to emerge as a hero.
Because we are dealing with an oratorio and not a play, and a recording at that, all this has to come through in the voice, and that requires great thought about what vocal colors to use at different moments. What colors convey diffidence and what others convey gravity and power, and how does one create these colors and use them to form an arc from one emotion to the next so that the audience can follow the character’s journey? The way I answer those questions will be different than the way someone else will, that is, if someone else even asks them.
In the end, setting up challenges for one’s self is always far more rewarding than playing it safe, and even if everyone around you tells you you’ve done a great job, it’s not great until you yourself are satisfied, with the knowledge that you can’t satisfy everyone and somebody somewhere will inevitably dislike what you do. Perhaps the biggest challenge for me is to not overthink things, because I can easily continue to see alternate approaches to what I already did, and get impatient for the chance to do one thing or another differently the next time.
The Co-Opting of Esther, 2024 Edition
I believe that a singer for whom the generational trauma of exile, pogroms, and genocide of Jewish history are irrelevant and immaterial would be keenly challenged to find the vital center of this role. The other day, an article in the New York Times detailed the most recent and insidious appropriation of Esther, this time by evangelical Christians who see her as a figurehead in their fight against things central to women’s wellbeing, such as freedom of choice, pluralism, and separation of Church and State. One could argue that this most current iteration of Esther theft, shall we say, can extend to music as well, if a singer unconnected to Jewish history, for whom the story cannot possibly resonate on a gut level, takes on Ester simply because of the pretty music and the opportunity for vocal display that it offers at the most superficial level.
Can you give us an idea, briefly, of how you were able to put the project together, in terms of funding, logistics, collaborators? When and how did Navona Records get involved?
The recording evolved from two live performances in New York that I produced through my concert series, Salon Sanctuary Concerts (SSC). New York University’s Casa Italiana, which had partnered with SSC previously on many smaller initiatives and then an award-winning film during the pandemic, provided the bulk of support for the recording, while a few smaller foundations and private individuals also donated.
I speak Italian, have studied voice in Italy for quite some time, and my series produced a week-long series of concerts in historic spaces in Florence for a few years. Most significantly, right before the pandemic, Palazzo Grimani in Venice, which hosts a school of early music, invited SSC to present a series of concerts there in honor of the Grimani family’s illustrious history of musical patronage.
So the Camerata Grimani, the ensemble that performs on the recording, was born in December of 2019, and many of my Italian colleagues on the recording, who are all stupendous, were for the most part people I knew well, and/or had already worked with.
When our original musical director had to bow out because of a family emergency, we had the great fortune to have my friend [conductor and harpsichordist] Jory Vinikour nearby in France and miraculously available to step in on a moment’s notice when I called him and asked “How do you feel about Stradella? Because something’s, um, come up…”
We were also very fortunate to get the great Fabio Framba as engineer on this project, and record in the exquisite Sala della Carità in Padova (Padua), which was a very inspiring, as well as acoustically favorable, environment.
After the recording was done, the project came to the attention of Navona Records, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Driven
It’s an impressive feat of energy and determination to have completed a project like this as both artist and producer. What drove you, and how much has it meant to you, professionally and/or personally?
Thank you! I’ve said before in reference to other projects that when I become consumed by the idea of a project, I will stop at nothing to bring it to fruition.
As an artist, the role spoke to me in so many ways that I felt I had things to say though Ester that I couldn’t say otherwise, and that what I had to say couldn’t be said by anyone else.
This recording has been, by far, the most all-consuming and involving project I have ever done. If some of my choices as a singer or as an actress don’t appeal to everyone, I can’t worry about it, because this is a composition, role, story, and project of bold statements at a time when certain issues in Jewish history, as well as aesthetic expectations of singing within the boundaries of Historical Performance, inspire contentious debate.
Being a person who is more comfortable with boldness rather than blandness, the profound challenges of getting this recording out into the world have all been worth it to me. Many of my programming and artistic choices, for years, have often appeared to court risk and confrontation. But I prefer that to playing it nice and fading into the woodwork.
Ester: Liberatrice del Popolo Ebreo is available now.
See also: our review of a 2019 production of Alessandro Stradella’s ‘Susana’
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