Tag: Renaissance

The Sixteen’s second concert, a cappella, a benchmark performance

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand International Arts Festival

The Sixteen  conducted by Harry Christophers

A cappella music by Tallis, Morley, Gibbons, Byrd, Sheppard, Tippett, Britten and James MacMillan

The Town Hall, Wellington

Saturday 3 March 7.30pm

The second concert by The Sixteen was devoted to music by composers born in Britain, not simply one who spent most of his life in the country, as was the first of The Sixteen’s concerts.

Two groups of Tallis’s ‘Tunes for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter’ were sung, four at the beginning and four at the end of the concert. They were a sort of purifying wash to introduce the audience to singing that was not too complex – in fact the first began with four men singing in unison – allowing the unprepared ear to adjust to the acoustic of the hall and to sample the sounds of many individual voices.

The choir is perhaps a little unusual in having more men than women, though that is because parts otherwise sung by female altos are here sung by male altos (or counter-tenors). It lent the ensemble a quality that set the exemplary sopranos in marked contrast to the weight of males singing the other parts.

Tallis’s ‘Salvator mundi’, in Latin, was a striking illustration of Tallis’s versatility, coping with the dangers of religious dogma as the country moved back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism. And the choir demonstrated the contrast between Tallis’s setting of English and Latin texts as clearly as his shift from the vertical harmony of English music to traditional Latin polyphony.

The Latin element was very temporary and it was followed by English part-songs: Morley’s ‘April is in my Mistress’ Face’ and Gibbons’s very beautiful ‘The Silver Swan’; the weight and warmth of the men’s voices kept the mood from becoming too ‘hey-nonny-nonny’ in Byrd’s ‘This sweet and merry Month of May’. John Sheppard’s ‘In Manus Tuas III’ returned to a Latin text, opening with a demonstration of men’s voices in unison, and then a strong counter-tenor solo.

The first half finished in the 20th century however with, first, James MacMillan’s ‘Sedebit Dominus Rex’, given a subtle Scottish accent (it’s one of his Strathclyde Motets), an attractive separation of men’s and women’s roles, to produce singing of very great emotion.

There was a second piece from MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets later: a striking contribution by women’s voices as well as the gentle opening section by basses, marked his ‘Mitte manum tuum’, again quite short and technically approachable.

The best known part of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time – the five spirituals – brought the first half to an end, with several opportunities for strong solo voices, particularly female.

Yet, what is it about a composer’s fundamental well-spring of invention and emotional power that consigns almost all of his music – apart from arrangements of existing melodies – to museum status almost within his own lifetime? No want of trying on my part, yet I feel impelled to revisit almost nothing even of the music I have on my own CDs.

The second half was also a satisfying mixture of the 16th and the 20th centuries; It began with three more Latin motets by Tallis, each with its distinct character, reflected in the tempo, in the varying amounts of legato singing, and the vocal colours produced by the choir.

The curious little dissonances (remarked in the programme notes) gave ‘O nata lux’ vitality; the next, ‘O sacrum convivium’, was by contrast sombre, calm and quite extended. The third motet, ‘Loquebantur variis linguis’, cleverly simulated a complex tissue of disparate languages through elaborate counterpoint: even those without Latin could have worked it out.

There was another Byrd motet, his masterpiece ‘Laudibus in sanctis Dominum’, that seemed to mark him as an English composer, set to song-like music in which vertical harmonies were as audible as the elaborate counterpoint.

The other major contribution from the modern repertoire were the Choral Dances from Britten’s opera Gloriana. For long, these were about all that was much performed from an opera that was inexplicably felt to be a ritual occasional piece, but is now firmly placed among Britten’s greatest operas. I was delighted to catch a performance a couple of years ago in the Ruhr, in Germany. Britten himself arranged this unaccompanied version of the dances, and I have to say, heretically, they did not make quite the impression on me that the original operatic ones did. They emerged, for me, somewhat affected and bloodless; but the performance of them was far from that.

The choir presented an encore: an arrangement by choral composer Bob Chilcott of a Tallis anthem.

Finally, the programme booklet was a model. It provided a wealth of rich and informative material about the choir and its director, but also writings about the composers and their social and political situation, and evocative thoughts about the nature of the music itself, all of which might deepen listeners’ knowledge.

Not enough of the audience bought the programme however.

From time to time I express my view that programmes for concerts – and other performing arts too – should be provided free. For a year or so New Zealand Opera did that, but later reverted to the practice of confining them to those who could pay the fairly high price for them. That is to sacrifice a valuable opportunity to deepen and broaden the audience’s knowledge of what it is hearing, a matter of even more importance now that most of the population under 50 is approaching the more serious arts without the benefit of any formal exposure to them at school where the sounds of good music (and poetry and foreign languages) can be implanted, perhaps subliminally, in the minds of the young – when that faculty is at its most receptive.

The major cost of programmes lies in the preparation of the texts and the design and formatting of the printing; for the fruits of those efforts to be restricted to a minority of the audience is a sad lost opportunity to educate.

The programme also took the trouble to ask the audience to refrain from clapping between the items in a group; the fact that few on the audience had programmes meant that there was applause between the numbers in Tippett’s Five Spirituals.

Imaginative New Zealand choral music from innovative Tudor Consort

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Renaissance Influences IV: Made in New Zealand

Music by Gillian Whitehead, David Farquhar, Ross Harris, Douglas Mews sen., John Ritchie, Anna Griffiths and Jack Body

The Tudor Consort, directed by Michael Stewart

St. Mary of the Angels Church

Saturday, 8 October 2011, 3pm

It was surprising to find the Tudor Consort performing works by New Zealand composers, and even more surprising to read the title of the concert.   However, there was no question, when one heard the works, about the influence of the renaissance composers on these down-under writers.  There was even less question, but rather joyful astonishment, at the skill of these works, and of The Tudor Consort in presenting them.  It was innovative to devise such a programme as this, and to commission two new works – the Ross Harris and Jack Body pieces.

The programme opened with the Kyrie from Missa Brevis by Gillian Whitehead.  The mass was performed section by section throughout the programme, interspersed with other items, as it would be in a church service, though of course there it would be interspersed through the liturgy.  Initially, this seemed odd, not to carry on the Gloria from the Kyrie, in a concert performance.  However, I think it worked well, giving each movement of the mass a freshness and pointing up the individual qualities of its parts better than would be the case if it had been sung through as a whole.

It was a most accomplished work for a composer who was still a student at university at the time of composition.  As the programme note said, “The unmistakeable influence of 16th century polyphony is clear from the outset…’   The full import of this influence grew as the various movements were presented.  But the skilled writing was apparent straight away.   There was much use of clashes of the interval of a second, and splendid dynamic contrasts.

The choir exhibited great attack and superb clarity of words.  In the Sanctus it was noticeable that some singers paid scant attention to the conductor, but the wonderful rise and fall of both pitch and contrapuntal complexity were well conveyed in spite of that.  This movement had a most rapturous ending.

Early on, the soprano tone was rather metallic at times, and one voice in that section had a tendency to dominate.  Nevertheless, in the main the choir’s balance was impeccable.  Only briefly at the end of the Agnus Dei was the choir not quite together.

Following the Kyrie, we heard Winter wakeneth all my care by David Farquhar, a setting of an anonymous 14th century English text.  This was a quite lovely setting of glorious words.  There was an interesting independence of parts, which gave frequent delicious clashes and juxtapositions.  The performance was magical.

The commissioned work from Ross Harris, Vobiscum in aeternum, was based on the well-known Tudor motet If ye love me.   Using the Latin version of the same words, this piece began with a gorgeous soft introduction.  The lattice-work of long-held notes in each part wove a beautiful, reverential solemnity in the fine acoustic of St. Mary of the Angels church.

The singing was beautiful blended, apart from one soprano who still dominated, from where I was sitting.  Otherwise, it exhibited the excellent attribute of carrying the sound and the words seamlessly forward, something the Australian judge of the recent Big Sing Secondary Students’ Choral Festival in Wellington commented on being absent from some of the otherwise excellent choirs that he heard perform.

Ross Harris could hardly have wished for a finer première performance.  The high standard continued in the adjoined Tallis original ‘If ye love me’ in English, that concluded the piece.  The brief for this and for the Jack Body commission was to take an ancient piece of music as a starting point.  I must admit to a sneaking feeling that it was a little pretentious that one composer used Latin instead of the English of St. John’s gospel in the King James version of the Bible, as used by Tallis, and the other to use Hebrew instead of the well-known and loved words, from the same version, for  Psalm 137 (or indeed the Russian of the introductory chant; see below).  However, this may have been the composers’ way of introducing an individuality that separated their compositions from the originals on which they were based – and it would be pretty difficult for a New Zealand composer to write for the Russian language.

Michael Stewart, in speaking to the audience, acknowledged that the next item, The Love Song of Rangipouri by Douglas Mews, did not have a Renaissance connection, but disarmingly stated that he liked it so much that he included it.  This work featured a soloist, Ken Ryan (baritone).  His facility with the Maori language and with the micro-tonality of the chant was astonishing, and his singing was very fine.   Based on a Maori chant recorded at Makara, the words are poetic and mystical; some of the lines were repeated in English.  I learned recently that even in the Far North, the pronunciation of ‘wh’ in Maori as ‘f’ was not traditional, if the early missionary Henry Williams is to be believed.  He wrote regretting the increasing tendency in his time for the ‘f’ sound to be used.

This was a difficult piece, but the choir brought it off, despite a few entries not being absolutely together.

The women of the choir sang two songs from John Ritchie’s Canary Wine song cycle: “I – Queene and Huntress”, and “III – Make Room for the bouncing Belly”.  The texts were by Ben Jonson.  I found it humorous to contemplate what now would be considered doggerel being written by the great Elizabethan playwright and poet: “Room! Room! Make room for the bouncing Belly, First father of sauce and deviser of jelly”.   There were unfamiliar words in the text, such as boulter and bavin, but thanks to a friendly pew-sharer and his I-pod, I now know that they all apply to domestic implements.

The music, good-humoured as is usual with Ritchie père, was utterly appropriate to the words.  It was good to have a lighter item in the middle of the programme; the singing was sparklingly accurate.

Anna Griffiths is a music graduate of the University of Auckland, and sings in The Tudor Consort.  She has won prizes for her compositions, and has had this and another choral piece performed overseas by the New Zealand Youth Choir.  Naseby is a setting of a poem by James K. Baxter, and depicts the Otago township.  I enjoyed the alliteration of the poem’s second-last line: “Then the dark peaks will hold their peace…”.  This was a very skilled and sympathetic setting, idiomatic with regard to the words.  The ending chord was not resolved, thus carrying through the music the timeless feel of the words.

Now for something completely different…  The men sang the Russian chant from the 17th century “Bogospod’i yavisya” (God, Lord, show yourself to us) which Jack Body used as the basis for his piece for full choir.  The men had a robust sound and relished the words, but perhaps could not obtain quite the resonant depth of tone of a Russian choir.

Psalm 137 was sung in Hebrew, influenced by the chant, but not in a Jewish style.  It began with three male voice parts interweaving “answered by a keening figure from the women” as the programme note stated.  It reached a climax at the end with the words “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” (speaking of the daughter of Babylon) – words not usually incorporated in choral settings of the psalm.

The piece was very quiet in parts, yet there was plenty of volume when required.  Intonation was unassailable.  The whole was most effective.

We are fortunate to have composers of this level writing imaginative, highly skilled and effective music for choirs.  New Zealand composers certainly know how to write choral music!  The strong choral tradition in this country no doubt lends strong inspiration, and the fact that there are choirs capable of singing the complex, accomplished music we heard at this concert.

Some of the pieces were written for more than four parts, adding to the achievement for a choir of only 20 voices.  It was certainly different for this choir to perform New Zealand works; works that were difficult and very interesting, including a variety of languages.  They made for a most worthwhile concert.

All the works were well worth hearing, and it is to be hoped that other choirs will take them up – they should be heard again.  One or two only (the Ritchie and the Mews) I thought I had heard before.

The level of expert performance by this choir is all the more amazing considering the comparative frequency of its concerts.  This was only an hour-long concert, but it was a solid programme, and there was a great deal of concentrated and expert singing.   Bravo!

The 16th century fashion for the 40-part motet: Tudor Consort sing Striggio and Tallis

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

 

The 40-part motets of Striggio and Tallis and other liturgical music by Tallis

The Tudor Consort conducted by Michael Stewart, with Peter Maunder (sackbut) and Douglas Mews (chamber organ)

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Hill Street

Saturday 23 July, 7.30pm

Tallis imitates Striggio
On Saturday’s Classical Chart, broadcast on Radio New Zealand Concert, presenter David Morriss took special pains to introduce the CD sitting at No 1; it was a 16th century motet by Italian composer Alessandro Striggio. The piece, sung on the top-ranked CD by I Fagiolini, was written to be sung by 40 distinct voices, each with his and her own part: ‘Ecce beatam lucem’.Striggio was court composer to the Medicis in Florence and the motet was written for the wedding of a Medici to the daughter of an Austrian noble family, so the music was appropriately composed by an Italian to words by a Viennese court poet (in Latin, naturally).

Morriss departed from custom by telling us that he was a member of The Tudor Consort which was to sing the piece in Wellington’s Catholic Cathedral that very evening, and suggesting that this live performance would be even better than that of I Fagiolini. Enough Wellingtonians (and perhaps others) heard the message to pour into the city on a cold, wet evening, making parking difficult in all the Thorndon streets in the neighbourhood of the Cathedral.

The basilica was packed and the unusual step was taken of opening the organ gallery for the overflowing crowd.

The Consort’s history with the Tallis motet
Now this was a special occasion for The Tudor Consort: 2011 is the choir’s 25th anniversary; at their 20th anniversary, for which founding director Simon Ravens had came out from Britain to conduct one of the concerts that celebrated the occasion. It was the one that included the 40-part motet, ‘Spem in alium’, by one Thomas Tallis; it was in St Mary of the Angel’s church (the first and rather spectacular concert of the mini-festival had been in The Great Hall of the former National Museum – now the school of arts of Massey University).

The Tallis motet had been among the works sung by the choir in its early years – it was conducted during a return visit by Simon Ravens in the International Festival of the Arts in March 1992 – when their concerts routinely filled whatever space they inhabited. I was at that performance, the first ever in Wellington and perhaps in New Zealand. Even more astonishing was the encore – a repetition of the whole motet.

Even without Ravens’ electrifying pre-concert talks, which were similarly packed out, the Tudor Consort’s renown was making a widespread impact.

A peak in Wellington’s musical life
 It was just one of several things, however, that generated a high level of activity and excitement that pervaded Wellington’s musical scene at that time, which was bringing large numbers into choral and other concerts.

There were several contributing developments in the mid-1980s: the inauguration of the marvellous (at least in its first decade) international arts festival; the emergence of a vigorous Wellington opera company; the proliferation of chamber music; the increasing contribution to the city’s music by the two separate tertiary music schools through concerts and an annual opera production by each school; the determined growth and energizing of the Wellington orchestra; and the blossoming of new and the reinvigoration of many existing choirs, stimulated in part by Simon Ravens’s brilliant success with The Tudor Consort.

I might also add that the fact that The Evening Post allowed me, from 1987 to the end, and several assistant reviewers, to cover a great deal of the music, is likely to have been of real importance. Typically we contributed around a dozen music reviews each month.

The 40-part motets
Recent research has shown that it was probably the visit of Striggio to London in 1566/67 to sparked Tallis’s interest in writing something comparable.

At this concert the two motets were sung: the Striggio at the beginning and the Tallis at the end.The Striggio was accompanied by sackbut (Peter Maunder on the trombone) and organ (Douglas Mews); it began interestingly, with certain men’s voices penetrating over others, and it was this character that made the experience rather unique in choral performance. I suspect that conductor Michael Stewart’s concerns were with individual detail and not with a conductor’s normal concern: the blending of voices, and it was the very variety of timbres and voice qualities that were audible throughout both the 40-part motets. So the varying size and grain of voices were free from the usual discipline of uniformity. It added enormously to the delight of the whole performances.

During the Striggio all forty singers were arrayed across the front of the sanctuary, but for the Tallis, only 10 were in the front and the rest were spread along the side aisles so that the conductor spent his time turning from front to rear, from side to side, signaling the bewildering entries accurately.

Stewart in the front of his choir presents a lively image. Not given to overly fussy gestures, it is the raised arms that seem to be carry the music to the place where the composers may have imagined their music was directed. His demeanour reminded me of cartoons of Berlioz on the podium, clearly drawn by an artist filled with admiration for the music he was inspiring. Stewart’s gestures seemed to have a similar inspiring effect on his singers.

The Striggio motet was quite short, perhaps six or seven minutes (I didn’t time it) and, compared with the Tallis, with fewer extended passages in which one could sense the full complexity of all those individual voices. The earlier piece seemed to allow more concessions to the style of the usual polyphonic choral setting with far fewer parts apparent.

While the longer more confident lines of interweaving counterpoint of Tallis create an air of greater permanence and moment because there is a denser feeling in his writing.

The other Tallis pieces
Only about half of the 40-strong choir remained to perform the shorter ecclesiastical pieces by Tallis that occupied the rest of the concert.

One could have thought the various short liturgical pieces were merely fillers between the two motets that had surely attracted the crowd. But all those who came because they genuinely loved Renaissance polyphonic choral music would have enjoyed the variety of music that this one composer could bend his talent to: the more complex music for the Catholic ritual compared with the more straight-forward, vertical harmonies, of the pieces for the Anglican rite. The English words of the ‘Magnificat’ and ‘Nunc dimittis’, are set to music that is conscious of the congregation’s comprehension of the words. The organ accompaniment was significant, even in tempo, though not constant as with a traditional hymn; the ‘Nunc dimittis’ ended with a curiously unusual final cadence.

Being conscious of the difference between the Anglican and Catholic (and both Tallis and Byrd had to tread carefully through the switch-back, lethal, religious ferocity that punctuated their lives) threw a new light on the Latin settings of responsories and antiphons where the spiritual impact was sought more through purely musical characteristics – sonority, flowing contrapuntal lines, the pitting of high voices against a bed of men’s more earthbound voices. The two settings of ‘Salvator mundi’, offered an interesting contrast within the traditions of the Catholic liturgy, the second appearing more sonorous and enjoying the warmth of its polyphony, with perhaps a little more attention to the blending of voices – just to show they could do it.

The ‘Loquebantur variis linguis’ caught the attention through its carefully discordant setting of those words, suggesting the polyglot talents of the apostles. ‘Candidi facti sunt’ seemed to play with the listener by starting successively in three different manners, eventually giving space for the tenors’ central plainchant performance.

‘O sacrum convivium’ used the current styles of polyphony in more orthodox manner, and it allowed the audience to enjoy, if it had escaped them before, the chance to hear harmonies involving more sustained contrapuntal passages.

The last motet, ‘Te lucis ante terminum’, more like a hymn in three distinct stanzas, was set as plainsong in the outer two stanzas and polyphony in the second. These examples of Tallis’s music demonstrated further, both the composer’s versatility as he navigated the reefs in religious storms, and the continued, constantly renewal of the choir’s talented singers and their series of imaginative and enterprising directors.

We await a performance of Striggio’s ‘Ecco si beato giorno’, reported to be the mass for 40 to 60 voices from which motet was evidently drawn.


Risurrezione from a new arts trust at St Mary of the Angels

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

La Musica – Sacra I
Böhm: Præludium, Fugue and Postlude J.S. Bach: ‘Komm süsses kreuz’ Biber: Crucifixion, Resurrection and Assumption sonatas Bruhns: ‘Mein herz ist bereit’ Buxtehude: ‘Singet dem herrn’
Krieger: ‘Ihr Christen, freuet euch’

The Historical Arts Trust: Gregory Squire (baroque violin), Pepe Becker (soprano), David Morriss (bass), Robert Oliver (viola da gamba), Douglas Mews (harpsichord and chamber organ)

St. Mary of the Angels Church

Saturday, 14 May 2011, 7pm

The Historical Arts Trust (THAT) is a new organisation, launched at the end of llast month, presenting four concerts this year under the title ‘La Musica’ (though despite that, and this concert’s title ‘Risurrezione’, the music was all German and Austrian, not Italian), in succession to the Musica Sacra concert series organised by Robert Oliver over the last ten years. Only two of the items, both vocal, could be considered well-known. As the name implies, the Trust intends to promote historical dance and other art forms, not only music.

The performers were all well-seasoned at their crafts – experts, in fact – and all have been busy lately in other performances. The novel feature of this concert was the fact that Gregory Squire had no fewer than four fiddles with him, given four different tunings. Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber von Bibern (ennobled for his services to music) was a 17th century composer who delighted in employing scordatura; i.e. the re-tuning of the violin. This was not in order to give the violinist a headache, in having to play the notes on the page in different places on the fingerboard from usual. The technique of tuning the strings differently, and in different arrangements, alters the sound markedly.

The three of Biber’s sonatas played in this performance each employed a different tuning. The remaining works Squire played in, in a very busy evening for him, used the standard tuning, hence the fourth violin. Biber is not often heard – although I have an LP from the early 1980s with Peter Walls’s Baroque Players playing a piece of his, and as I write this review, RNZ Concert is broadcasting ‘Chamber Music from Lincoln Center’, in which a Biber violin sonata is being performed, one in which the violin imitates animals and birds. Biber was considered a violin virtuoso in his day; Gregory Squire can’t be far behind.

Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians says of Biber’s use of this technique: “Bringing some of the strings closer together in pitch makes possible or simplifies the production of the most resonant intervals and chords… The result is a smoother, more easily flowing, richer-sounding polyphony than is possible with conventional tuning. … Mystery Sonata no.11… was planned for a highly resonant performance in octaves, each octave stopped across two strings by one finger.” The audience experienced these effects.

The programme opened with Douglas Mews playing the harpsichord in the Böhm work. This, one of two items on the programme once attributed to J.S. Bach, was no rote reproduction of the notes on the page, nor ‘fork on a bird-cage’ sound. It was an attractive work, sensitively performed.

Bach genuinely composed the next item, ‘Komm, süsses kreuz’, a bass aria from St. Matthew Passion. David Morriss sang, with continuo of viola da gamba and organ. While the recitative lacked a little in ensemble and tone, the aria developed well. It was sung with feeling and evenness of tone throughout its quite wide range. I found the organ, using flutes only, a little light behind the voice and viola da gamba.

Next came the first of the Biber sonatas – ‘The Crucifixion’ Sonata X. The harpsichord accompaniment was not very audible, but perhaps it was sufficient for a continuo part. This was very skilled violin playing. The sonata became fast, and was rhythmically exciting. The difficulties of playing while reading notes different from the usual for the various strings were certainly not obvious. The sonata featured double-stopping, and its ending was fast and furious, featuring the earthquake that followed Christ’s crucifixion in a most evocative manner.

Gottfried Henrich Stötzel is now credited with the composition of the well-known aria long attributed to Bach: ‘Bist du bei mir’. (All the composers in the concert except Stötzel and Krieger were B’s.) Soprano Pepe Becker sang it, with organ and viola da gamba continuo. It was sung simply, in a straightforward manner, quite beautifully. Here again, I found the organ a little quiet in the continuo, compared with the sound of the viola da gamba.

Biber returned in the form of ‘The Resurrection’ Sonata XI. The effect of the re-tuning was more obvious here than in the first sonata performed. There was a marked contrast between the mellow lower strings and the more strident upper strings. The slow, discreet organ accompaniment consisted of seldom-changing chords, i.e. long pedal points (not literally; the small chamber organ is played with the performer standing.)

The viola da gamba begins the second movement with a chorale melody, on which the violin then plays variations, interspersed with repetitions of the chorale (Easter hymn ‘Surrexit Christus hodie’) itself, in octaves, possible because of the re-tuning (see note from Grove, above). Again there was very intricate work for the violin, which was expertly executed. A surprise towards the end was all the performers (except the very occupied violinist) singing the chorale. In the final iteration of the chorale there were delightful key modulations.

Bruhns’s cantata Mein herz ist bereit for bass, violin and continuo was very varied in the treatment of the words, though I thought David Morriss’s pronunciation of ‘bereit’ a little strange. However, this was a piece making great demands on the singer, to which he rose admirably. The words in the first verse which translate as “I will sing and give praise” were very ornate; the composer certainly had a very competent singer in mind. The next verse began “Awake, my glory:. Indeed, anyone would have to wake with the amount of sound declaimed rapidly in one’s ear! The bass’s sound filled the church (which is more than the audience did).

The third verse, “I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people”, featured a lovely violin part (presumably with standard tuning). The final voice, “Be thou exalted, O God”, was followed by very decorated “Amen’; the whole well sung by Morriss. In this work, I felt the balance was better between the instruments. The work was notable for great sound, rhythm and accuracy. The organ came into its own, but was never too much for the other performers.

After the interval came a work by Buxtehude, that Danish-German composer beloved of organists: Singet dem Herrn. Pepe Becker sang, with violin and continuo. The joyous first verse was preceded by a lovely violin introduction. The voice part began low in the register, which we don’t associate with Pepe Becker; she revealed a fine, rich tone. From there, soon there were florid phrases in the upper register, skilfully managed, as always, while the violin part was very exciting.

Then there was a slower calmer pace with lilting passages in the second verse to the words “The Lord declared his salvation”. More vocal gymnastics followed, leading to a lively final verse.

The third Biber piece was ‘The Assumption of Mary into Heaven’ Sonata XIV. Gregory Squire used yet another of his four violins. A wonderful, full-toned opening with the continuo revealed a very rhythmic dance-like piece in ¾ time, lots of finger-work for the violinist, incorporating left-hand and right-hand pizzicato and a ground bass from the viola da gamba, also incorporating a pizzicato section, and variations for violin and organ over the ground. After a slow beginning, more and more rapid ornamentation gave this item the ‘wow’ factor.

Finally, a cantata from little-known Johann Philipp Krieger (1649-1725), only a few of whose many works survive: ‘Ihr Christen, freuet euch’. This time, both singers were involved, with violin and continuo. Some verses were solo, while others were duets.

In the fourth verse, David Morriss’s excellent low notes were rich. Violin obbligato passages were ecstatic, especially in the instrumental interlude between verses 4 and 5, the former being a delightful duet. The fifth and final verse featured great purity of the harmonies and melodic lines, and decoration of the latter on the violin and viola da gamba during the pause after the vocal lines, and before and during the Amen, which brought this charming work to a conclusion.

Concert-goers were presented with an attractively produced printed programme. I’m not sure why this concert was timed to start so early; perhaps there were logistical reasons. As someone who lives some way out of town, I find it a challenge to the stomach to have to rush to a concert in the city that commences before 8pm.

It was a great evening of highly professional performances of difficult and mostly rare baroque music, with a couple of more familiar arias thrown in.

The Tudor Consort opens season at the Carillon

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Music from the Sistine Chapel

Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652): Missa ‘Che fa oggi il mio sole’
Felice Anerio (c.1560-1614): ‘Regina caeli laetare’; ‘Ave regina caelorum’ Josquin des Prez (c.1450-1521): ‘Domine, non secundum peccata nostra’
Cristóbal de Morales (c.1500-1553): Andreas Christi famulus
Palestrina (1525-1594): ‘Assumpta est Maria’

The Tudor Consort, conducted by Michael Stewart

National War Memorial

26 February 2011, 7pm

The National War Memorial is a venue that the Tudor Consort has used a number of times over its 25 years. This concert was a free one for 70 or so subscribers who attended, to open its 25th anniversary season.

While not quite the Sistine Chapel, this little chapel has a handsomely decorated interior, has superb acoustics for unaccompanied voices, yet is not too reverberant, and is an appropriate size for a small choir – though it has to be said that when in full flight, the Tudor Consort was a shade too loud at times. Some choir members wore (subtle) red with their black, in tribute to those who died and have suffered in the Christchurch earthquake. Michael Stewart announced that the choir would put on a benefit concert for earthquake fund soon.

Most of the items were sung with 14 voices, while one (the Josquin) used only eight. Michael Stewart’s short introductions to the items were informative without overloading us with information. The concert lasted approximately 75 minutes – a good length for this sort of music; longer, and the ear might have become wearied.

The Allegri Mass, like most of his extant music written for the Sistine Chapel Choir, of which he was a member, was broken up to be interspersed between the other items in the programme. The Credo was not sung.

Right from the opening Kyrie of the Mass, attack was excellent, phrases were beautifully shaped, and most of the parts were full-toned and wonderfully varied. In the early part of the program there was a rather metallic sound somewhere in the sopranos in the upper register.

The Gloria presented waves of lovely sound washing over us. The tonal and dynamic contrasts included a soft ‘you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us’: exquisite delicacy in contrast with the robust, muscular bass singing that followed. The texture was almost always well balanced.

Anerio was a priest-composer who wrote for the papal chapel. His ‘Regina caeli’ demonstrated a more complex style than that of Allegri. For these two items the choir moved to singing antiphonally, as two choirs facing each other on opposite sides. The music brought out some of the very rich voices in the choir, as it contrasted homophonic with polyphonic passages to give an extraordinary effect.

The Sanctus and Benedictus of the Allegri Mass revealed perfect tuning from the choir, and superb cadences.

Josquin, the Flemish composer, spent many years at the Sistine Chapel, and his music continued to be sung long after he died – not something that was common at the time. His piece performed by the choir was written for Ash Wednesday, and was appropriately pure and subdued. The choir was reduced to eight singers for this item.

‘Domine, non secundum peccata nostra’ opened with only the two altos and tenor, whose singing was very fine. This was remarkably smooth and restrained singing, yet there was plenty of sonority and volume when required.

The ‘Andreas Christi famulus’ of the prolific Spanish composer and member of the papal choir, Cristóbal de Morales, was full of lavish sounds, especially at the cadences. The audience luxuriated in the intertwining chords and contrapuntal lines flowing ever onward.

The Allegri Agnus Dei was exquisite; very dramatic, yet graceful and elegant.

Palestrina’s tenure as a choir member was short-lived; he was married, and a change of pope from Marcellus who appointed him in 1555 meant that the rules were more strictly applied, so he had to go. His hymn to Mary featured wonderful word-painting. It was much the most declamatory, confident and exuberant of the items. The confident music was matched by the confidence of the choir, who produced a full, extravert tone throughout, with florid, contrasted dynamics.

The building’s resonance had a curious effect: the pitch of the reverberation was always slightly sharper than the note just sung – only noticeable at the end of items – rather like the effect when a car, train or other vehicle sounding its horn passes one; the pitch after it has passed is higher.

It was a concert of uplifting music, sung with verve, energy and conviction. The choir reached a high level of achievement and professionalism.

Sacred Heart Cathedral Choir sings Victoria – a moment in time

Posted on by Peter Mechen

A Requiem for All Souls

Tomás Luis de Victoria – Mass for the Dead

Sacred Heart Cathedral Choir

Michael Stewart, director

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Saturday, 30th October 2010

I ought to confess right here and now to having a bias towards presentations of liturgical plainchant, as it was very much the kind of church music I grew up with, being a Catholic and a New Zealand child of the 1950s. So, of course, this concert touched so many of my points by dint of sheer content, the effect immeasurably augmented by the general excellence of the singing and the music’s direction throughout. This was a reconstruction by Michael Stewart and the Cathedral Choir of Renaissance Spanish composer Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Mass for the Dead, or Requiem, in a proper liturgical setting – that is, in the context of the Catholic Mass. The placement of Victoria’s beautiful polyphony amidst the plainer and starker liturgical chants worked to the advantage of both, creating a well-nigh unique ambience, one to which the Cathedral surroundings gave even more atmosphere and impact.

Throughout the opening Introit Requiem I got the impression that these choir voices hadn’t been overly-moulded and honed into an excessively homogenous blend, a quality which I liked in this circumstance, as it gave to my ears a plainer, more direct and accessible feeling to the singing, almost as if the music was something one could oneself join in with. Having said this, in no way do I want to give the impression that the singing was anything but beautiful throughout – if the lines were not always ideally pure, they were still in tune; and invariably made up in focus and fervour for what they occasionally lacked in elegance. The middle voices gave consistent pleasure at the outset, with “et lux perpetua luceat eis”, bringing into relief moments such as the sopranos’ strongly-etched “et tibi reddetur” which followed. But most telling was the reprise of Requiem, which had a wonderfully charged devotional quality, an evocation whose intensity set the tone for everything that was to follow, such as the succeeding Kyrie, beautifully blossoming upwards from its first phrase, and contrasting nicely with its hushed, ethereal companion Christe.

Choir and conductor brought out the beauties of the Graduale, with its flourishes at “dona eis Domine” and timelessly-wrought cadences at the word “perpetua”. There was delight at a single soprano voice at “In memoria” being joined by others and reaching full resplendent tones at “mala non timebit”, the latter sequence  all the more wondrous through being “ritualized” by the plainchant exchanges between celebrant and choir. But what really set my pulses racing was the singing of the Dies irae, all eighteen verses of it, each poetic metre of three lines a self-contained meditation or beseechment regarding the Day of Judgement. When I was at school, we sang this alternating verses between small group and larger choir; but here, tonight, this was performed with full choir throughout, each verse given subtle variations of colour and emphasis depending on its content. The last, Lacrimosa, breaks the metre somewhat and features a new melody, which releases the tensions built up by the previous repetitions and their ever-growing emphasis, here realized by Michael Stewart and his choir in a profoundly satisfying way, at once sturdy, resigned and aspiring to the celestial.

And so it all proceeded, ritualistic gestures of exchange alternating with Victoria’s exquisite word-settings, such as those of the Offertorium, allowing us to relish the choir’s surge of emotion at “de poenis inferni”, and the luminous soprano lines at “repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam”, both moments to be treasured. And I enjoyed the celebrant’s intoning of both “Vere dignum et justum est” at the Preface and the Pater Noster, once again losing myself in remembrances of the patterning of the chants and their variants. Alternatively, Victoria’s treatment of the Sanctus put me in mind of Thomas Tallis in places, while the Lux aeterna again featured a nicely-distilled soprano line at the outset, and a properly devotional “quia pius es”, though I did register a touch of “hooted” tone from those same sopranos in the “Requiem aeternam” section. With the Libera me, the Proper of the Mass concluded, Victoria leaving the opening line as plainchant before developing “Quando caeli movendi sunt et terra” into vivid descriptions, tenor, alto and bass lines standing forth at “Tremens factus”, and with the whole choir excitingly igniting the textures at the point of return to the “Dies irae” text. As was fitting, the lovely cadential resolutions at “Requiem aeternam” worked their spell alongside the varied reprise of “Libera me”, extending the music’s mood, colour, declamation and harmony, and leaving the plainchant Antiphon to bring things to a properly poised and dignified end.

Given that my appreciation of this concert was undoubtedly coloured by my own history and experience of the music’s liturgical context, I felt confident nevertheless that my enthusiasm for the singing and conducting, as well as for the overall conception of performance, was well-founded. I’m sure my enjoyment would have been shared by all at the Cathedral that evening.

Sweet Dreams from The Song Company

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Song Company – Chamber Music New Zealand

English and Italian Madrigals: William Byrd, John Wilbye, Thomas Weelkes,

Thomas Vautour, Claudio Monteverdi

Horatio Vecchi – A Night in Siena

Peter Sculthorpe – Maranoa Lullaby

Jack Body – Five Lullabies/Three Dreams and A Nightmare

Anon. – Israeli Lullaby

The Song Company, directed by Roland Peelman

Anna Fraser, Louise Prickett – sopranos / Lanneke Wallace-Wells – mezzo-soprano / Richard Black – tenor / Mark Donnelly – baritone / Clive Birch – bass

Town Hall, Wellington

Saturday 16th October, 2010

I spent the first part of this concert luxuriating in some glorious madrigal singing from the talented Australian vocal ensemble The Song Company, touring the country under the auspices of Chamber Music New Zealand. The ensemble’s programming enabling me to enjoy and marvel at both the similarities and differences between the English and Italian schools of renaissance vocal composition. The English group, which began the programme, contained some exquisite gems, from the heartfelt immediacy and world-within-a-flower simplicity of John Wilbye’s Draw On, Sweet Night, to the virtuoso inventiveness of Thomas Weelkes’ Thule, the period of cosmography, the group encompassing and beautifully expressing both kinds of intensities and fluidities. Wilbye’s major-minor colourings and antiphonal dynamic variations were most sensitively given, readily evoking the chiaroscuro of both outer and inner worlds commented on in the excellent programme notes. By contrast, Thomas Weelkes’ writing suffused the soundscape with intricate dovetailings and overlappings of tones and rhythms, beguiling one’s ear with echo and contrast, the unbridled mock-satire of Ha!Ha!This world doth pass a kind of Dionysian jest on the opposite end of the see-saw from the idiosyncratic philosophy of Thule. And I loved the sharp-etched character of Sweet Suffolk Owl, with its “te whit, te whoo-ings”, the group’s articulation and dynamism making the most of Thomas Vautour’s vivid portraiture of an iconic bird.

It’s probably too simplistic to declare that the main difference between the two madrigal schools seems to be the actual sound of each language; but the liquidity and sonority of those Italian vowels seemed straightaway to add a whole tonal dimension to the music – a different kind of intensity, rather less subtle, but richer and darker-toned seemed to me to come across almost straight away. The gloriously declamatory Sfogava con le stelle, with its evocation of the beauties of the night sky, milks the rhetoric to stunning effect, the singers full-toned and committed throughout. No less heartfelt was the following Si, ch’io vorei morire (the text’s erotic suggestiveness adding to the emotional charge), ascending sequences and repetitions in thirds heightening the expressive power of it all. Momentary relief was at hand from the weather and its interplay with the rest of Creation, with Zefiro torna, though the initial gaiety and playfulness of the nature-descriptions suddenly gave way to darkness and despair as poet and composer bemoaned the loss of the beloved amid Springtime’s felicities – the setting’s final line stretched the music’s expressivity almost to its limit before the heart-stopping final resolution. Mercifully, Oimè, se tanto amate and Amorosa pupilletta were better-humoured, the first giving rise to amusement with its repeated mock-serious “Oh my!”s, and the second featuring a drum accompaniment and wordless Swingle Singers-like “do-do-do-dos” providing a rhythmic carriage for a sombre dance of longing, beginning with a solo, then a duet, and then the ensemble, the singing keeping the impulses of feeling nicely ebbing and flowing throughout.

The group’s director Roland Peelman introduced Horatio Vecchi’s entertainment A Night in Siena, composed in 1604, a kind of musical catalogue of instructions for people to follow a game of mimicry – as the programme note puts it, “a 16th-Century version of musical theatre-sports”. I found the spoken introduction difficult to properly hear, so the programme note and texts of the songs were life-savers. The sequences were most entertaining, poking gentle (and, topically, probably not-so-gentle) fun at different types of people, be they travellers from other lands or simple girls from the country. One didn’t have to “read between the lines” to glean prevailing native attitudes towards these people, the German imitation taking us remarkably close to Basil Fawlty’s “Don’t Mention the War!” by the end, and the introduction to the exotic Spaniard persona making naughty reference to his abilities “as a very cunning linguist”. It was all tremendously good-humoured fun, the quasi-Spanish “effects” to finish rousing the participants (and their audience) to great enthusiasm, and a warm reception at the end.

After the interval the focus shifted from nocturnal entertainments both amatory and theatrical to the earnest business of sleep itself, by way of lullabies, dreams and nightmares. Peter Sculthorpe’s arresting Maranoa Lullaby fully exploited the spacious ambiences of the Town Hall, with the singers stationed at various points around the gallery. Dramatic lighting heightened the impact of each voice, the opening single-voiced bell-accompanied lullaby (originally an indigenous melody collected in Queensland during the 1930s) counterpointed by the other voices, all taking turns to add their melodic strands to the tapestry. A plaintive, strident episode caught up these strands and pulled them tightly together, focusing and hardening the harmonies, before bringing the work back to the unison theme once again. The whole sequence created a dream-like inner world which, despite its short duration, cast a powerful and evocative spell.

More complex and discursive, but with comparable subconscious explorations in places was the clever fusion of two works by Jack Body, the older (1989) Five Lullabies now interspersed with the freshly-commissioned Three Dreams and a Nightmare. The “invented” word-sounds of each of the lullabies demonstrated the composer’s interest in different folk-idioms and traditions relating to chant, while the dream/nightmare sequences explored the subconscious realms of sleep itself, using poetry by authors such as Shakespeare and ee cummings set with marvellously-wrought accompaniments, both vocal and instrumental – I loved the wordless exhilaration of the first Dream, Flying, with its vertiginous lurching and gong-like tintinnabulations, the singers occasionally sounding warning sirens in close proximity to reefs on treacherous sea-coasts. This was followed by the impulsive and volatile Brain worm, involving endlessly inventive vocalisings, layered, multi-harmonied and seemingly tireless. Throughout, the Lullabies gave a continuing “fled is that music?” ambience to the work’s progressions, rather like arias between recitatives, so that the saucy eroticism of ee cummings’ poem may I feel had an extra element of fantasy which for me gave those somewhat outrageous Rochester-like physicalities a more poignant, escapist connection (then again, perhaps I was simply feeling my age!)….still, those glass harmonica-like sounds, together with the volatile seduction-vocalisings made the whole Erotique episode properly suggestive and delightful.

The Nightmare pulsated and palpitated appropriately, the performance virtuoso in its control of detail and atmosphere, with drums and woodblocks beating out obsessive rhythms, threatening inescapable and intransient anarchic realms familiar to all who have experienced such disturbances – the poetry, well-known from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, evoked that wondrous imagery of “the cloud-capp’d towers” yoked with the stuff of dreams, the ensuing vocal writing suggesting a similar wonderment at the words’ fusion of the timeless and the ephemeral. Interesting that a composer would come back to an existing work and augment it thus – though there was a lot going on both in an immediate and a cumulative way, the contrasts had the effect of refocusing the listeners’ attentions and drawing them ever onwards.

Both the anonymous Israeli lullaby which followed, and the Eurythmics-inspired encore, brought us back from the labyrinth-passages of the subconscious sufficiently to enable us to properly and whole-heartedly register our approval at the end of the concert – the Song Company gave us “Sweet Dreams” which were entertaining, enchanting and inspirational.

Resplendent Monteverdi at St Mary of the Angels

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MONTEVERDI  – Vespers 1610

Baroque Voices / St.Mary of the Angels Choir /  Academia Sancta Mariae Ensemble

Robert Oliver (director)

St. Mary of the Angels Church

Boulcott St., Wellington

Saturday August 14th 2010

No work has inspired more disagreements among both scholars and musicians regarding both its history and performance practice than Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. The British musicologist Denis Arnold once wrote about the work, “To perform it is to court disaster. To write about it is to alienate some of one’s best friends”. Happily for Wellington audiences, no such strictures seemed to hang over the head of Musica Sacra concert series director Robert Oliver, who organised and directed two performances of the work in the splendidly atmospheric precincts of St Mary of the Angels Church, marking the 400th anniversary of the music’s publication in Venice. Oliver took what some people still considered to be a courageous step by performing the work with ten solo singers, one to a part, drawn from Pepe Becker’s Baroque Voices group, and accompanied by an ensemble of baroque strings, cornets and sackbuts, two organs and two theorbos. I was told by one of the singers that a friend’s reaction to the “one-singer-to-a-part” idea was expressed in tones of sympathetic disbelief. However Oliver’s faith in his “virtuoso singers and players with a brilliant command of all the instruments and techniques” (a quote from the programme notes) was richly vindicated by the splendours of the ensuing performance.

Oliver had directed a version of the work previously in Wellington a number of years ago with a choir of nearly thirty singers and a mixture of baroque and modern instruments, but felt that, with the advantages of more recent research into Monteverdi’s original intentions, plus the increased skills of early instrument players, the time was nigh to tackle the work afresh with up-to-date knowledge and performance practices. The aim was to reproduce more closely the sound that Monteverdi was believed to have had in mind for the work. The result was, in a word, stunning – singers and instrumentalists surpassed themselves in evoking a sound-world that seemed at one and the same time of the period and timeless, casting a potent spell over the  imaginations and sensibilities of the audience members throughout the evening. Such occasional roughnesses as there were seemed so infrequent as to be of little consequence when set against the sweep and power of the whole, qualities which continually transcended the earthly and invoked the divine.

The church’s antiphonal potentialities were nicely realised right from the beginning, the St Mary of the Angels’ tenor choir voices intoning the opening “Deus in adiutorium” from the choir-loft at the rear of the church, to which the full ensemble of singers and instrumentalists replied from the front across the spaces, investing the words “Domine ad adiuvandum me festina” (Lord, make haste to help me) with truly age-old fervour and exotic colour. From this moment on the performance never flagged, the solo singers confident and nearly always accurate and secure with both their soaring lines and their often treacherously decorative impulses of melismatic energy, and the instrumental playing lustrously-toned and scalp-tinglingly characterful. Having solo voices gave the vocal lines such creative character, in the slower polyphonies the strands both blending and activating each other’s timbral differences, while in the quicker music the flavours and colours of the combinations produced occasionally an almost kaleidoscopic effect.

Sopranos Pepe Becker and Jayne Tankersley relished both their duet-style combinations and the more antiphonally-placed exchanges, their very different voices producing a real frisson of interaction, very marked, naturally enough, in their big duet Pulchra es, whose music I thought had a wonderfully charged eroticism. Pepe Becker floated her voice gloriously at “Averte oculos”, and Jayne Tankersley, so physically expressive by way of response, brought a sense of urgency to “Me avolare fecerunt”, her body appearing to physically choreograph the intensities of what her voice was doing in an extremely involving way. In other places, such as during Psalm 112’s Laudate Pueri Dominum (beautifully-sustained tones from both singers at “Ut collocet eum cum principibus”) and also throughout Lauda Jerusalem (Psalm 147), the antiphonal interactions and dovetailings of the sopranos made for a wholly sensual sound-effect, in fact highlighting what the rest of the ensemble was also doing so delightfully. Altos Andrea Cochrane and Christopher Warwick had fewer exposed lines, but made the most of their opportunities, most notably in the Hymn Ave Maris Stella, where each sang a verse most mellifluously, and also within the concluding Magnificat, where their steady, sustained tones provided a perfect foil for the more energetic and decorative lines of the tenors and basses.

The last-mentioned played their part as well, with the tenor parts particularly prominent. Both John Beaglehole and John Fraser contributed strong, sonorous tones to the many ensembles, and fearlessly tackled their various solos, most of which were resplendent with decorative detail. John Beaglehole made a strong beginning to the motet Nigra Sum, his voice confidently projected and nicely focused, surviving an uncomfortable patch of intonation at “Flores apparuerunt” to recover his poise somewhat for “Tempus putationis advenit”. Beaglehole and Fraser brought the two questioning Seraphims beautifully to life at ‘Duo Seraphim” before being joined by a third tenor, Philip Roderick, for the affirmation of the Blessed Trinity in heaven. And in the Motet Audi Coelum Beaglehole’s ecstatic phrases praising Mary, Mother of God, were echoed by Fraser off-stage to evocative effect amid tumultuous interjections by half-a-dozen of the soloists with continuo (it sounded as though there were more), beginning at the word “Omnes”, and continuing to the end, including the gentler “Benedicta es”, sung here with richly-focused tones and finely-honed ensemble. If basses David Morriss and Chris Burcin, along with baritone Dimitrios Theodoridis, had less spectacularly exposed material to sing, they still registered a powerful presence, blending beautifully in Dixit Dominus (Psalm 109) at “Judicabit in nationibus”, and contributing strongly-etched lines to Laudate Pueri Dominum (Psalm 112) as well as displaying some thrilling muscularity at “Quia fecit” in the concluding Magnificat.

With true-toned contributions during the Antiphons from the St.Mary of the Angels Choir, directed by Stephen Rowley, a feast of resplendent singing was dished up for our delight throughout, happily matched by the burnished splendour of the instrumental playing from the Academia Sanctae Mariae ensemble, and associated players. Earlier in the year at a Te Papa concert which featured Renaissance madrigals we’d had a taste of Peter Reid’s evocative cornetto playing – but here, with two other cornetto players, as well as sackbuts, recorders and theorbos (enormous lute-like fretted instruments), along with strings and two organs, the potential for instrumental colour and visceral excitement seemed almost too good to be true. The standing ovation which greeted the performers at the end of Saturday evening’s performance well-represented the audience’s astonishment and delight and deep enjoyment at the stellar efforts of singers and players alike. Musica Sacra concert series director Robert Oliver brought to bear his enormous skill and experience in this repertoire with vision and intensity, and in doing so inspired a performance of this legendary work which will surely be talked about in Wellington for years to come.

Sweet, Seductive Sounds – La Musica Antica at Te Papa

Posted on by Peter Mechen

La Musica Antica

Un viaggio musicale – a musical journey through the 16th and early 17th century

Songs and instrumental music from Italy

Music by Monteverdi, da Festa, Da Rore, Rognioni, Spadi, Strozzi, Frescobaldi, Caccini and Mazzochi

Pepe Becker (Baroque  Voices), soprano / David Morriss, bass

Robert Oliver (Phantastic Spirits), viola da gamba / Donald Nicholson, virginals

Peter Reid, cornetto

Te Papa Marae, Wellington

Sunday, 11th April, 2010

La Musica Antica consisted of singers and instrumentalists from different performing groups in Wellington coming together to charm and delight an audience with some utterly gorgeous sounds from the late Renaissance/early Baroque era, all secular music, and mostly on the topic of love.  A programme with English translations of the songs was provided at the concert, but I had little recourse to refer to mine during the performances, so captivated was I with the “sounds” of the music-making, the combination of voices, cornetto, viola da gamba and virginals having an unashamedly sensuous appeal to my susceptible ears.

Remarkably, these musicians recreated these sounds with one of their original number missing, soprano Rowena Simpson being indisposed and unable to perform. Pepe Becker reassured us that the concert wouldn’t be unduly affected, because cornettist Peter Reid would play all the duets with Pepe, realising the second soprano part on his instrument. The only piece they couldn’t thus play was the first listed in the programme, a Monteverdi duet for two sopranos and cornetto Come dolce hoggi l’auretta which was dropped.The concert began instead with the second-to-last listed item, a work by Costanzo da Festa, Venite amanti insieme, for soprano, bass, and cornetto, music whose pleasingly “ancient” sounds called to mind scenes of festive pageantry, of a kind often used in presentations of Shakespeare and his times.

The cornetto, whose sound has such a distinctive colour and timbre, worked beautifully as a “singing voice” especially in duet with Pepe Becker. Add to the texture David Morriss’s sonorous tones, and you have, as in da Festa’s Si come sete, a beautifully-tapestried combination of singing lines, delightfully teased-out for the listener’s pleasure. Again, as with most of these settings, it seemed to me to be the sounds as much as the words which gave these settings their peculiarly intense passion – something about these tones are “charged”, making a perfect vehicle for the highly emotional words of the texts.

Pepe Becker’s soprano was as pure an instrument as I’ve ever heard it to be, whether in duet with the cornetto, or creating whole realms of beauty out of a single line. Where she really showed her solo mettle was in the Barbara Strozzi setting I’Eraclito Amoroso in the concert’s second half, the composer requiring of the singer a vocal line that soars, weeps, fumes, melts and charms, the whole drawing the listener into the gamut of emotion wrought by a text describing the despair of love’s betrayal. Then, with the singer in partnership with the cornetto, Monteverdi’s Ohimè, dov’ è il mio ben featured Pepe Becker and Peter Reid in perfect accord, relishing the music’s mellifluous harmonisings and beguiling dovetailings of lines.

In such forthright company, David Morriss’s beautifully soft-grained bass voice, though clear enough in the opening Venite amanti insieme, by da Festa, was occasionally too reticent, especially where the tessitura was extremely low, as in the same composer’s Affliti spirit miei – here the voice needed a bit more juice in places, though the overall effect was touching and sensitive. He had more opportunities to shine in the following Una donna, where a slightly higher and more energetic line allowed the voice more expressive freedom. By the time he had reached Giulio Caccini’s spectacular Muove si dolce, towards the end of the programme, his voice had completely settled, resulting in powerful and varied tones used excitingly, with great runs, and, occasionally, even some very low notes. Adding to the excitement here and elsewhere was the continuo-playing of Robert Oliver on viola da gamba and Donald Nicolson on virginals.The instrumentalists had solo items, or extended solo passages within items, both the cornetto and the viola da gamba taking it in turns to duet with the virginals, each combination producing fantastic playing, some incredible runs and entertaining contrasts between both instruments and music keeping us burbling with interest and enjoyment.

The final Folle cor by Domenico Mazzochi brought together all the different elements of the concert’s success, again those seductive green-and-golden sounds, brought out by beautifully intertwined teamwork from singers and instrumentalists, relishing the quixotic rhythmic patternings of the setting. This was a kind of “eat, drink and be merry; for tomorrow…..” song, whose recurring and somewhat sobering moral has its own common-time gait, underlining the contrast with the lighter, more carefree tread of the verses. Some of the composers in this concert were names I did not know – Costanzo da Festa, a sixteenth-century Italian composer who, like Monteverdi, wrote both sacred and secular music, Giulio Caccini, a member of the renowned Florentine Camerata, who, along with Jacopo Peri, is regarded as one of the very first composers of opera (each composed an Eurydice at about the same time), and Domenico Mazzochi, who wrote only vocal music and is best-known for his activities an a papal composer, working at the same time (late renaissance, around 1600) as the aforementioned figures. To be able to be entertained AND educated thus at a free concert of this quality goes to show that there are still silver linings that flash and glitter into view amid the present gloom of uncertainty and recession and whatever else darkens our lives; and that we should thank our luck stars for them and for the musicians who make them shine so brightly.

The Tudor Consort sings Byrd

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Motets from the two volumes of William Byrd’s Gradualia; two organ fantasias; Motet: ‘Domine quis habitabit’

The Tudor Consort conducted by Michael Stewart, with Douglas Mews (organ)

Sopranos Jane McKinlay, Anna Sedcole, Erin King; alto Andrea Cochrane; counter-tenor Dimitrios Theodoridis; tenors Philip Roderick and Richard Taylor; basses Brian Hesketh, Matthew Painter, Richard Walley.

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart; Saturday 13 February 2010

The Tudor Consort’s first concert of 2010 was wholly devoted to vocal liturgical music by William Byrd, apart from the inclusion of two of his keyboard fantasias played by Douglas Mews.

The choir’s director, Michael Stewart, spoke before the concert about Byrd’s two volumes of Gradualia, a term used sometimes used for the settings of the ‘Proper’ of the Mass – the part that varies according to the festivals of the church calendar – as well as for one section within the ‘Proper’; and he distinguished the ‘Proper’ from the ‘Ordinary’ of the mass whose six parts are unvarying: the usual content of musical mass settings. He also spoke of Byrd’s difficult times as a Catholic in the reign of Protestant monarchs Elizabeth I and James I, and the effect it had on his musical settings; and touched on the textual difficulties of Byrd’s publications, particularly of the first Volume of Gradualia.

Though ten members of the choir were on hand, most of the pieces were sung one voice to a part, varying between four and six voices; the final motet, ‘Domine quis habitabit’, demanded nine voices.

Though this was undoubtedly authentic in terms of the forces Byrd was probably limited to in Protestant England, we have no way of knowing whether, if his Catholic liturgical music had been written in times when performances did not have to be very private and small scale, he would not have expected a larger choir. Does it really serve the music well to pursue authenticity in such a literal way?

One voice to a part is undoubtedly a more challenging matter than singing in a larger choir where a good blend is probably easier to achieve and the experience for each singer is no doubt less nerve-wracking; and where the enjoyment of the audience might just be increased.

For the most part rehearsals seemed to have produced reasonable confidence in the singers. These are talented and well-schooled singers, but throughout the concert I was never unaware that the very distinct voices did not blend particularly well to create an illusion of real homogeneity.

The voices that stood out tended to be the high ones: the three sopranos and counter-tenor Dimitrios Theodoridis. In the pieces from the first volume of Gradualia, the strong and penetrating voices of Theodoridis and Anna Sedcole were conspicuous while mezzo Andrea Cochrane’s warm voice seemed rather better adapted to creating a successful blend. She, and the lower men’s voices, created an attractive liturgical ambience.

The ten singers took turns singing in each group of motets, adhering strictly to one voice to a part. The concert took examples of the 109 motets that comprise the two books, for various feasts or festivals: for the Virgin Mary in Advent, for Corpus Christi, for Pentecost, for the Assumption and for Saints Peter and Paul.

Jane McKinlay took over the soprano role in the next group, for Corpus Christi, her voice a little more readily blending, in the calm Offertory and the following ‘Ave verum corpus‘ where hers was the only female voice, supported by the two tenors Philip Roderick and Richard Taylor and bass Matthew Painter; something of a real choral sound was produced. The singing succeeded in reflecting the gruesome nature of the words contemplating Christ’s mutilated body.

Though the range of vocal styles is limited, the subtle differences emerge as the ear and mind become acclimatized; the Sequence from the Pentacost Propers, ‘Veni sancta spiritus’ expressed through lively dotted rhythms, was an interesting case.

I detected some uncertainty in the next motet, ‘Factus est repente’ and raggedness in the Assumption Introit, ‘Gaudeamus omnes’. But the general precision and the scrupulous attention that had been paid to dynamics and intonation were far more noteworthy.

Douglas Mews played two fantasias on the chamber organ; the first, Byrd’s own arrangement of one of his fantasias for viol consort, the other an original organ fantasia. The first, in C, struck me as rather overcome by its subdued character, its interest lying in its slowly evolving textures; the second, in A minor, was probably an early piece, not very sophisticated though technically accomplished; the playing suggested some hesitancy.

The final motet, ‘Domine quis habitabit’, came as something of a welcome change, partly because it uses more voices and offered a wider sonic palette, with less tendency for individual voices to dominate. It too was an early work, as the programme note points out, thus closer in spirit and technique to Tallis, and perhaps not as representative of the mature Byrd as are the Gradualia. Nevertheless the constant, elaborate counterpoint was an impressive statement of the composer’s genius. It was a happy conclusion to the concert, allowing us finally to enjoy the essential strength and skill of the choir.

There is another question that I’m prompted to raise here.

In a time when Christian belief and practice are at a historic low, and familiarity with the terminology of the liturgy and church practice are only vaguely understood by the majority and probably not even very well by many Catholic adherents, is it time that the presumption of understanding of the arcane references to the liturgy and church ritual, without elucidation, was reconsidered? Short glossary notes should be routinely offered whenever such expressions are used.

While Stewart did explain the significance of the Ordinary and the Proper of the Mass, such pains were not routine. To take a few examples of terms for which no explanation was offered. First: the meaning and significance and place in the service of the Gradual, Antiphon, Introit, Offertory, Responsory, Eucharist; and what is ‘a votive mass’? And it should be routine to set down the dates and meanings of the various Christian feasts – Assumption, Pentecost, Advent, Annunciation, etc. There is a great deal more.

As with so much else in the realm of ‘classical’ music, the use of such terms, without simple explanation, is very likely one of the reasons this music is considered ‘elitist’, beyond the reach of the un-trained, the un-lettered: in fact, the great majority of people who are no longer exposed by their families, at any point in their school lives, or subsequently through the media, to religious liturgy or classical music of any kind.