Aldeburgh followed its spring weekend events with a three-day Easter festival and, while the intimate style and scale of early Baroque repertoire might not be the obvious choice for the Maltings, the warmth and clarity of its wood and brick acoustic made the Sixteen seem perfectly at home.
The pattern of this concert imitated the two halves of Claudio Monteverdi's Eighth Book of Madrigals, which divide into Songs of War and Songs of Love. And although the point was clearly made that in some ways there may be little to differentiate the two states - since love requited equals nothing so much as victory and the pain of love unrequited feels like abject defeat - the Sixteen's choice of opening madrigal from the Songs of War also showed that Monteverdi was using the subject to his own end. The words of the lively Introduction to the dance praise the Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand II for bringing an age of peace to the Holy Roman Empire through his victories in battle. At the Maltings, the light was too dim and the print too small for it to be immediately obvious that this is political spin and that Monteverdi is putting in a musical job application. But it sounded wonderful, and in his six-part setting of Petrarch's sonnet Hor che'l ciel, the precision of the Sixteen, with the instrumental accompaniment woven artfully through the voices, was beguiling.
In the Songs of Love, the sweet and pure sound of the Sixteen's sopranos Elizabeth Cragg and Angharad Gruffydd Jones was perfect for the nightingale song whose beauty Monteverdi extols in Dolcissimo uscignolo, and in Altri canti di Marte director Harry Christophers balanced sensuality with exuberance.
The Monteverdi madrigals framed performances of motets by Heinrich Schütz. Here the sacred Latin texts are set with harmonies often more piercingly beautiful than in secular settings, as tenor Joseph Cornwell proved in the solo motet O Jesu, nomen dulce. The Sixteen's particular virtue is its ability to deliver music of great intricacy with such freshness and spontaneity.
