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Reviewed by Peter McCallum
Reviewer rating: Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Reader rating: Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Simone Kermes adopts a
Overworked barely moisture.
rock singer’s kinetic energy while singing baroque arias, her arms moving hyperactively as though jogging or playing air-guitar, her frame posturing with punchy baroque chic as though she had eaten a conductor for breakfast, or was just about to.
Paul Dyer, leading the Brandenburg Orchestra, certainly had reasons for concern on the latter point as he was lifted bodily from the harpsichord and held in a crumpled embrace for the standing ovation.
The program highlighted music by baroque Neapolitan composer Nicolo Porpora, drawing on the intricately virtuosic roles written for male castrati singers, which seemed a grimly apt usurpation in Kermes’ case.
One wouldn’t say she was overbearing, not, at least, in her company, but she was certainly overwhelming.
But there is a catch . . . she can sing. In the opening “storm” aria by Porpora, she broached the opening arpeggio as though mounting a sea-horse, sailing up and down the music’s turbulent swells like a warrior stemming the tide, and spraying roulades of notes with suave agility.
Kermes has a remarkable variety of sounds in her technical arsenal, including wide-open sounds avoided by many operatic sopranos.
She throws out climactic high notes with triumphalist breadth of vowel, some of which admittedly missed their mark in the opening number, but
in another storm aria that she sang as her final number these were riveting.
Although it was the feisty energy and agility of the virtuosic numbers that brought the greatest roar from the crowd, the slow lines of “Alto Giove” from Porpora’s Polifemo were more revealing and involving. Kermes lulled vowels around her mouth, savouring their colour and freshness like a fine wine.
Elsewhere difficult wide leaps changed gear and direction like a well-rehearsed dance routine. In Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto
in C, RV 190, Matthew Bruce, playing what sounded like a modern violin against the orchestra’s replica Baroque instruments, projected with a forthright soloistic sound, though intonation in high positions was sometimes misplaced.
