Lucy Gellman Photo
Et egressus est a filia Sion omnis decor ejus, sang Sherezade Panthaki, perched over the book of music open in front of her. The Latin rolled off her tongue, landing on the floor in gold droplets. Facti sunt principes ejus velut arietes non invenientes pascua.
Around her feet, the flat marble of St. Thomas Episcopal Church’s foundation began to rupture and quake, the church falling to its knees, and then its 1931 foundation, as she sang. One swooping high note and columns rose up, accompanied by the incense of an early 18th-century church. Another, and old aisles, buttressed by intricate stained glass, materialized. Suddenly, listeners knew exactly what they were dealing with: the church — or churches — where composer François Couperin had envisioned his music performed centuries ago.
Panthak’s transfixing performance on Wednesday night was part of Elm City Consort’s presentation of Couperin’s complete Leçons de Ténèbres to an audience of around 60 at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in East Rock. The piece is generally reserved for the Holy Wednesday before Easter, to usher in the Tenebrae that come before Sunday services across the world.
Composed between 1713 and 1717, the Leçons de Ténèbres captures the unrest and upset of Jerusalem’s storied destruction in delicate, but sometimes gritty, song and verse from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Excerpts from Lamentations weren’t uncommon during the Renaissance, Elm City Consort’s Michael Rigsby explained to the audience beforehand. But Couperin diverged further, using “dissonance, repetition and wide vocal ranges” to elicit complex responses from listeners and Holy Week attendees. That’s wildly evident in the work: Performed partly in the dark and partly in candlelight, each movement begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, so that the listener can experience the destruction of the city as it unfolds before Jeremiah’s eyes.
Wednesday’s performance struck an empathic nerve that hooked listeners into the piece and kept them there for the long haul. With Stephen Gamboa on harpsichord, Grant Herreid on theorbo, and Rigsby on viola da gamba, the group conjured Couperin’s musical moment in which Jeremiah’s fury is met with a sense of aural ornament and flourish, and it’s up to the listener to work through the two. Stepping in at the last minute for mezzo-soprano Virginia Warnken Kelsey, Jolle Greenleaf thrilled, leaving no high note (and there were plenty) untouched, no duet with Panthaki half-finished.
But the standout of the evening — the thing that transported listeners back to 1713 — was Panthaki, so profoundly moving because she was moved, in real time, by the music. From the moment she first opened her mouth to the moment she finished the piece, listeners got a delicate ballet with the composer, watching as she melted into the notes and they into her. It went beyond the vocal equivalent of what Michael Baxandall called “the period eye” in art history. Panthaki didn’t just try to approximate the experience of being in Couperin’s moment. She really was.
“Half my brain is on technique, tuning, the text and the music,” she said after the performance. “But I’ve sung these pieces before. I feel like they’re a part of me. They resonate with me so much. I think the context in which the piece was written is so special, the texts are so beautiful and so evocative and so old … but the setting is so stunning.”
“There’s no other way to describe it,” she added. “It’s just feel good music. It just makes me feel good to do it.”
