Green Mountain Monteverdi Ensemble of Vermont Returns With ‘Vespers of 1610’

Early music specialists routinely call Claudio Monteverdi a “towering” composer. Besides inventing opera as we know it, the Italian single-handedly bridged the Western music tradition’s Renaissance and baroque styles. His most famous piece? Vespers of 1610, aka Vespers for the Blessed Virgin, a setting of the canonical evening prayers in Latin whose musical innovations continue to astonish 400 years later.

As it happens, Vermont has a singing group named for the guy: Green Mountain Monteverdi Ensemble of Vermont — a chuckle-inducing feat of redundancy that plays off the literal translation of monti verdi (“green mountains”). Founded by bass Stephen Falbel in 2012, the ensemble has performed works by Monteverdi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, and other Renaissance and baroque composers in roughly one concert per year — but never Vespers.

Green Mountain Monteverdi will finally take on its namesake’s seminal work in two concerts this weekend, on Saturday, May 3, at Christ Episcopal Church in Montpelier and Sunday, May 4, at Burlington’s Cathedral Church of St. Paul. Directed by Falbel and Nathaniel Lew, the performances are the group’s largest yet. Nine of Falbel’s singers and 11 more from the Counterpoint chorus, which Lew directs, will join an 11-member instrumental ensemble. Period instruments include a cornetto, a recorder, a sackbut (an early trombone) and a theorbo (an oversize lute).

Falbel had originally planned to feature Monteverdi’s Vespers for the chorus’ 10th anniversary concert, but the pandemic caused an extended interruption. These performances will be the group’s first since 2021.

Meanwhile, the Green Mountains have echoed with Vespers performances: Upper Valley Baroque performed the work in April 2023 in Randolph, in a lavish production that featured Calais soprano Mary Bonhag; and Eric Milnes’ inaugural Burlington Baroque Festival in September 2024 opened with it.

The recent flowering has only solidified Falbel’s desire to present the work anew. Over coffee at the North Branch Café in Montpelier, the director and his wife, Lindsey Warren — a soprano member and early music specialist who helps with programming, production and publicity — pointed out that their group’s performances, unlike the others, will feature only Vermont singers.

In any case, Monteverdi’s Vespers is “one of my favorite pieces of music of all time,” Falbel, 58, declared. A transportation planning consultant by day, he was first introduced to early music while singing in Harvard University’s Glee Club.

“My relationship with this piece goes back 40 years,” he continued. “I’ve collected 12 recordings and have gone to six or eight performances.” He’s also performed it twice, including in 2010 with the former Burlington chorus Oriana Singers, under director Bill Metcalfe.

Deep immersion in Vespers has inspired a certain approach to its realization that Falbel said he has yet to hear in performance.

“What differs is, I come at this from the older side,” he said. “I consider Monteverdi as a Renaissance composer who is breaking new ground with these techniques. It’s a revelation, what he’s doing. Whereas someone coming from Bach would say he’s a not-quite baroque composer.”

Such biases have resulted in recordings in which, for example, “the tempos are all over the place,” Falbel opined. “Some directors take things really fast. We keep a steady tempo.”

Lew, 57, a tenor who will be singing the work for the first time and directing two movements while Falbel steps away to sing, described the structure of Vespers as based on Gregorian chant lines in the choral parts, around which soloists perform more elaborate melodies.

The historical difficulties of the piece go beyond the fact that “no one marked tempos back then,” Lew added. “The notation is different, with weird sets of clefs, and there’s the question of what key to sing it in. Baroque pitch is lower than standard pitch; research suggests Monteverdi was higher than standard. Stephen is really knowledgeable about all this stuff.” To accommodate the key shift, organist Lynette Combs will play a portable organ that automatically transposes the pitch.

The singers, meanwhile, face a daunting score — especially the six tenors, who are “the main star of the show,” Falbel said. When the director assigned tenor Adam Hall of Burlington a significant solo role, he gave him plenty of notice.

“Adam is a terrific musician, and he can definitely wing things, but this is not wingable music,” Falbel explained.

Hall, 47, confirmed during a phone call that “this is for sure the hardest thing I’ve ever sung, and I’ve been singing professionally for 30 years.” The tenor has been with Green Mountain Monteverdi since its first concert and jokingly described the group as “the Vermont Avengers of baroque music,” noting that its singular focus on one program a year results in members’ unique passion and dedication.

Part of Vespers‘ difficulty comes from its “ridiculous amount of ornamentation,” Hall said. Monteverdi often wrote these out rather than leaving them up to the singer, he said, “so you see a lot of 64th notes in very quick succession.” Certain trills are so fast they have to be produced with the throat rather than the breath and sound “like a machine gun.” A standard melisma, the technique of singing a single syllable over multiple notes, is “that times a million” in Monteverdi, he said.

Despite its difficulty, Lew added, “It’s just glorious music. The reason to do it is not just that it’s really different from the music before and after, but it’s uniquely expressive. There’s never been a composer who’s more emotionally expressive.”

This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2025.

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