Quebec based Les Violons du Roy performed on Sunday at Koerner Hall with soprano Karina Gauvin and contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux.  The music was all drawn from Handel’s English language oratorios and featured orchestral pieces and a number of arias and duets.  These works are some of my favourites so I was a bit surprised that I didn’t enjoy the concert as much as I expected.

The orchestral music was fine.  Les Violons du Roy are quite a small ensemble; mainly strings with a couple of oboes, bassoon, archlute and harpsichord, so it’s not a “grand” sound but they play well (I especially liked the woodwinds) and conductor Jonathan Cohen obviously knows this repertoire pretty well.

So why did I have issues with the singing?  Some of it is a personal preference for a countertenor most of the time in castrato rep.  It’s not that a female voice can’t work; think Sarah Connolly as Giulio Cesare for example (but even there I would prefer Andreas Scholl) but I find Marie-Nicole Lemieux’ voice just a bit too fruity for this music unless she really tries hard to be subtle.  To be fair, I really liked her interpretation of Irene’s music from Theodora; especially “As with rosy steps the morn”.  She even sounded pretty good as Didymus in “Streams of pleasure ever flowing” where the blend with Karina Gauvin was very pleasing.  The rest, drawn from Solomon, Judas Maccabeus, Joshua and Alexander Balus didn’t work as well for me.

So what was bugging me?  I think it was the attention to text, or lack of it, by both singers.  If one can’t make out the words of a Handel oratorio without the cheat sheet something is wrong and that was too often the case on Sunday.  Perhaps they were trying too hard to be dramatic in the rather “flat” setting of a concert of excerpts divorced from context?  Perhaps it’s the general North American tendency to make Handel “bigger” than is usually the case in Europe these days?  Who knows?

This is a personal thing I guess because most of the audience lapped it up.