Oregon Music News

It doesn’t seem to make any sense to put works by Leonard Bernstein and Claudio Monteverdi on the same bill, but that’s exactly what Portland Opera is going to do. Bernstein was an artistic juggernaut who lived in the 20^th Century and is best known to this day for the musical “West Side Story.” Monteverdi lived from 1567 to 1643 and is considered the creator of the first opera, “Orfeo,” which he wrote in 1607.  

But this weekend, you will get the opportunity to hear three one-act operas: Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti,” and Monteverdi’s “Il ballo delle ingrate” (The dance of the ungrateful women) and “Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda” (The Battle of Tancredi and Clorinda). The performances will be sung and acted by the young Portland Opera Studio Artists, the band in the orchestra pit will be the Third Angle New Music Ensemble, and all forces will be conducted by Robert Ainsley.  

Ainsley is the principal coach, chorus master, and assistant conductor for Portland Opera, and has already conducted “The Return of Ulysses,” “Albert Herring” and “La Calisto” for the company. During the summer, Ainsley travels to Connecticut where he is the principal conductor of the Greenwich Music Festival.  

I met with Ainsley at the Portland Opera HQ to find out more about how this Bernstein-Monteverdi mash-up of one-act operas is going to work.  

How are the Bernstein and Monteverdi pieces tied together?  

Ainsley: Musically they are tied together through the element of improvisation: the jazz and blues elements in Bernstein and the quite bluesy harmonies in Monteverdi. There’s a funny kind of groovy feel to both of them. In the dance parts in the “Ballo,” we get a groove going with the guitar. I have the string players listen to his groove so that they fit into it. There’s another part in “Ballo” that I make the players play a swing sound – which is the direction at the beginning of “Trouble in Tahiti.” So rhythmically and harmonically with the scrunchy chords, the pieces are linked.  

That being said, they are 350 years apart and are wildly different in many other ways!  

How about dramatically?  

Ainsley: From the dramatic angle, we’ve got a concept driven production that’s fascinating on different levels. You’ll need to see it several times, because there’s so much going on. It’s frightening to be in the room with Nic Muni, our stage director because he is so skilled, so knowledgeable, and so intelligent. He’s linked the three pieces together in one overriding dramatic structure. It sets up with the morality tale in “Il ballo delle ingrate” which we are calling the “Dance of the ungrateful dead” – we are being more p.c. about it so that it’s not just women. Monteverdi wrote the piece was written for the Duke of Mantua, who was the horrible despot womanizer who was made famous in “Rigoletto.” Venus asks Pluto to bring the dead out of the underworld.  

“Ballo” is the only complete, extant example of a masque – a court entertainment – by one composer to have come down to us. Usually masques were mash-ups – a little orchestral music and dances by several composers and artists. So this work is a very important historical document.  

So four ungrateful couples come out of hell. They have scorned love before they died. They tell two examples and one of them is the second Monteverdi piece, “The Battle of Tancredi and Clorinda,” in which love is shunned, because the couples were unaware of it. The second is Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti,” which tells of a troubled relationship. Then the couples go back into hell at the end.  

It’s all tied together like that. In the “Combattimento,” the narrator is having an emotional battle with one of the ungrateful dead at the front of the stage. Then there’s the actual fight being acted out by two fighter-actors. There are also the two singers, Tancredi and Clorinda, having a jedi-like mind battle. So we have three couples who are fighting in different ways simultaneously. There’s so much tension in the room at times that you could cut it with a knife.  

Bernstein said that his “Trouble in Tahiti” is more like musical theater, but it has sustained lyricism and reaches out emotionally like Mahler.  

It must be an incredible challenge to switch gears from Monteverdi to Bernstein.  

Ainsley: It’s a leap of about 350 years, and I had to make it in the last rehearsal in about thirty seconds. Going from sitting at the harpsichord, surrounded by violins with gut strings, and realizing a figured bass in the Monteverdi to picking up a baton to conduct a jazz clarinet lick in the Bernstein is a bit of a reality shift to make. But it’s all music! And you just have to get on with it.  

Third Angle is your pit band. Are they going to play the Monteverdi on period instruments?   

Ainsley: Yes, they will. Greg Ewer is the lead violinist and Ron Blessinger, the Third Angle’s music director, is playing second. I’ve been working cellist Hamilton Cheifetz on the decay of the sound. He has such a fine ear and is a superb cellist. But one of the biggest discoveries is that we are using a mean-tone temperament. So in some of the chromatic lines his fingers don’t play out of tune. They just go to where an F sharp is. But for us – with the mean tone temperament – our F sharps are very low. And all of our flats are very high. So, he’s finding out a new way to listen.  

The temperament – especially in works like the “Ballo” – where you need chromatic color – the chromatic chords need to sound scrunchy, because there’s a lot of pain and torture in it.  

For the readers who don’t know what mean-tone is, can you give us a brief description? It has to do with the way you tune an instrument, right?  

Ainsley: Yes. With a dichotomy, when you have an octave the frequency is twice as high. There are exact mathematical fractions for the other intervals as well. A fifth is 3/2. A major third is 4/3 and a minor third is 5/4. And that’s why they sound beautiful. The problem is that if you take a low C and you go up octaves, you get one number. But if you go up in fifths then you end up slightly sharp. That’s called a musical comma and you have to hide it somewhere.  

Even-tone is 12 comma. That means that we even out all of the semi-tones so that they are all even. We distribute that musical error between all 12 tones. But with a mean-tone temperament, we choose where we are going to distribute it, and we distribute it unevenly. Some of the common chords sound beautifully in tune – like C major, F major, and G major are gorgeously in tune. But F sharp major is disgusting. So we have to tune for F sharp and B flat and C sharp. But when it comes to E flat, we have to decide whether to tune for D sharp for B major or tune for a C minor for E flat.  Then with A flat, we have to tune for E major if it’s more common or for A flat is F minor is more common.  

Some of the early music instruments have split keys so that you could choose whether you were going to play a B minor chord or a B major chord. It’s interesting to note that back in the Baroque period the two groups that used even temperament were lutes and viola da gamba consorts.  

Why was that?  

Ainsley: It might have been how the frets worked and that they just sounded better with even temperament. There are old treatises from keyboard players of that era, saying that they aren’t going to do that disgusting thing that lutenists and da gamba players do with their even temperament.  

Before the performance begins it would be really interesting for the audience to hear a scale of notes on a harpsichord that has been tuned with a mean-tone temperament.  

Ainsley: Yeah. Some really out-of-tune chords. Sometimes we have to miss-out thirds because we know that they are going to be out of tune.  

Do you have to do anything special for the Monteverdi pieces?  

Ainsley: There’s not an awful lot of realization of the score. The score only has a bass line. It’s largely unfigured. You have to decide on the chords – the actual harmonies – as well as the instrumentation, the dynamics, and the attacks. Monteverdi didn’t leave much information in the score; so you have to realize the music in terms of your own artistic response and your own stylistic knowledge.  

Frequently, the voice part doubles the bass line. So you have one musical line from which to create an entire opera! No indication of dynamic. No indication of harmony.  

You just turn off your cell phone and channel Monteverdi?  

Ainsley: There are stock chord combinations. You have to have knowledge of harmony and counterpoint. As you work with this music, you figure it out.  

Your background as an organist must be helpful.  

Ainsley: I kind of miss playing organ these days.  

You should get one installed here at the opera offices.   

Ainsley: [Laughing] And play it naked like the Monty Python man.  

So did you write out the score and give it to the players?  

Ainsley: I wrote in the violin parts.  

[Ainsley opens one of his scores and shows a couple of pages.]  

There’s a lot of annotation, a lot of pencil marks.  

So I could say that the Monteverdi pieces are realized by Robert Ainsley?  

Ainsley: That’s the job of the conductor for the recitar cantando operas. It was the beginning of opera. The thought of setting a libretto to music and have everything sung was very experimental in Monteverdi’s day. For the very first opera ever written, Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” all the singers and the instrumentalists were in a room for six months of rehearsal before it was first performed. I can’t imagine how fabulous that performance must have been!  

Monteverdi’s “Combattimento” is just amazing. It’s one of the finest pieces of program music ever composed. The music is incredibly vivid. He goes for such extreme effects, but he didn’t have the terms for it. He couldn’t write an accerlerando because it hadn’t been invented. So he shortened the note values and implied that the music gets faster. He didn’t have diminuendo as a sign; so he ties to half notes together, writes forte over the first, piano over the second and tells you to play it with only one bow. He didn’t have the notation for pizzicato; so he wrote that you put down the bow and thwack the strings with two fingers. Isn’t that great!  

Ainsley during a La Calisto rehearsal (2009) Photo by Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

What should we be looking for in terms of sound?  

Ainsley: The most important thing in Baroque music is decay, because the instruments that you are working with – like the harpsichord and guitar – have a much faster rate of decay than a piano or a modern string section, which can sustain an amazing legato. So with Baroque music the voice has to work with that decay. You can’t hang on to final syllables in the way that you would in order to project over a Verdi orchestra. You must decay on the note or you are left hanging out and there’s nothing underneath you.  

Have you written any of your own compositions?  

Ainsley: I’m not much of a composer. I’m a chronic perfectionist. It took so much out of me to write a bloody Amen for my college choir. I labored over it forever.  

Who picked these pieces?  

Ainsley: Our general director Chris Mattaliano chose them. He has done all three pieces, but separately, at Juilliard many years ago. He’s a Monteverdi freak.  

[Laughter]  

What a great idea.   

Ainsley: It’ll be fascinating set of performances.  

Break a leg or at least a baton!  

Ainsley: Thanks!