"The warbling of female throats tantalised the male listeners in highly sexual ways," read the programme note for the first half of a recital by Barbara Bonney and Bernarda Fink. The concert was part of Just Duets, a series devised by Bonney. The music thus described consisted of duets by 17th- and 18th-century composers - among them Monteverdi, Caccini and Carissimi - written for performance by women for a private audience of aristocratic men. They are characterised by a certain unity of textual imagery and style. Vaguely rude lyrics - Renaissance conceits that equate orgasm with death, women playing blokes (usually shepherds) in order to generate lesbian frissons, and so on - are set to closely twined vocal lines that aim to generate arousal by teasingly withholding harmonic resolution.
It's a nice idea and a testament to Bonney's overriding intelligence; few other singers would schedule a programme of such blatant intent. On this occasion, however, the musical sex show failed to materialise. This was partly because the musical imaginations of both Bonney and Fink are essentially chaste, and partly because their voices don't ideally blend in this repertoire. Some of their material was famously performed and recorded by rival German divas Irmgard Seefried and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in the 1950s, and the inevitable comparison points up the flaws in the more recent pairing. Seefried and Schwarzkopf were wide-ranging sopranos comfortable singing in their middle registers. Bonney, however, is a high soprano, Fink a low alto, and the music pulls them away from where they sound best. Bonney's lower registers are often breathily unsupported. Fink, much of the time, is singing too high.
Piano accompaniment doesn't help here either. Roger Vignoles plays well enough, but the piano itself conveys solidity. The transparency of a harpsichord would have been preferable.
After the interval came Schumann and Mendelssohn. Here both singers were on a surer footing, with Bonney soaring in the stratosphere and Fink's bronzed low notes sending shivers down your spine. Gounod's motet D'un Coeur Qui t'Aime formed the encore and the pair flung themselves into its saccharine religiosity with abandon, blowing it up into a grand display of almost operatic vocalism while Vignoles surrounded them with surging arpeggios of glutinous intensity.
