'Hymns to the Virgin': Tallis Scholars/Phillips - Lassus, Josquin, Guerrero, Martin, Stravinsky, Pärt, and Isaac, 21 December 2021

St John’s Smith Square

Lassus: Alma redemptoris mater
Josquin: Missa Ave maris stella
Guerrero: Maria Magdalene et altera Maria; Ave virgo sanctissima
Matthew Martin: Sanctissima
Stravinsky: Bogoroditse devo
Pärt: Virgencita
Isaac: Virgo prudentissima

Tallis Scholars
Peter Phillips (director)

St John’s Smith Square’s 36th Christmas Festival has gone ahead as planned. That in itself is something to grant seasonal cheer, especially at what again is proving a trying time for all of us. So too was this concert from festival regulars the Tallis Scholars, with music spanning a period of more than half a millennium, from Josquin’s Missa Ave maris stella in the late fifteenth century to Matthew Martin’s 2017 reimagining of Francesco Guerrero’s motet Ave virgo santissima, first published in 1566.

The concert opened with Lassus’s polychoral motet, Alma redemptoris mater, separation and recombination of the two ‘choirs’ (four singers apiece) taking place in typically patient, unshowy unfolding from Peter Phillips and his singers. Like much of the evening’s programme, it sounded bathed in Marian radiance, albeit of distinctly different varieties that yet all remained worlds distant from the concerted likes of Monteverdi or Mozart. In context, Lassus’s eight-part antiphon—he also set the text for five and, twice, six voices—sounded almost as if an overture.

If so, it was an overture to the mass honouring the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Josquin des Prez. We heard a properly responsorial ‘Kyrie’, its opening upward fifth signalling to all and sundry the cantus firmus that permeates so much of the setting in a motivic fashion it is difficult not to think of as ‘modern’, however problematic and ultimately unsatisfactory the notion may be. The ‘Gloria’ offered a not entirely dissimilar sense of unfolding and building towards climax such as we had heard in Lassus. Words were never underlined, yet nonetheless ‘spoke’ as Phillips and the Tallis Scholars traced, even inhabited Josquin’s work’s musical contours. (And no, it does not seem to me anachronistic here to speak of a musical work.) A glowing, full-toned ‘Sanctus’ contrasted nicely with the duets of the ‘Benedictus’. The crowning canonical writing of the ‘Agnus Dei’, canons recalling earlier writing and seemingly underlining the form of threefold petition, was permitted a sense of the expansive: in performance as in work, one might say. At any rate, there was a sense not only of conclusion but of culmination, without attempting to transplant later values not at home here.

Following the interval, we turned to two motets by Guerrero. His Maria Magdalene et altera Maria tells of that celebrated discovery on Easter morning. Here were a different voice, method, and subject matter; a different radiance too, I think. Yet again, there was that sense of patient unfolding and building unobtrusively towards a fine climax on ‘surrexit’. Our Saviour was risen indeed. There was a graver, more hymnal beauty to be heard and felt in Ave virgo sanctissima. Indeed, the prayerful quality in which I felt involved, no mere observer, imparted a sense of physical and metaphysical kneeling. Romantic nonsense, perhaps, though harmless if so. Martin’s reimagining, written to accompany the original, had Guerrero’s lines travel in lines of refracted, relative dissonance, within a tonal framework. Intonation sounded spot on, as surely it must be. It was rather lovely to hear in context.

The radical simplicity of Stravinsky’s Bogoroditse Devo quite simply brooked no dissent, as jewel-like an ‘object’ as, say, the Octet. It simply ‘was’—and doubtless will be. Arvo Pärt’s Virgencita took a lot longer to say rather less, yet the performance was one of evident fondness, warmth and patience bringing ‘holy minimalist’ process to the fore. Some attractive, almost Poulenc-like chords (in abstracto, not functionally), quite resplendent in performance, made the time pass more quickly. The encore, Pärt’s minute-long setting of the same Old Slavonic text set by Stravinsky was written for King’s College Cambridge's Service of Nine Lessons of Carols. The singers imparted a welcome sense of carolling dance to its despatch.

In between we heard Heinrich Isaac’s magnificent Virgo prudentissima, making the case for Archduke—soon Emperor—Maximilian’s piety, the Virgin his heavenly advocate. When compared with, say, Josquin, display of musical intellect seemed more overt. Canonic procedures came more strongly to the fore, propelling words in a fashion that had very much its own direction and directedness. Not for nothing did Webern write his dissertation on Isaac. This was an arresting polyphonic and cosmogonic tour past dominions, fiery cherubim, angels, archangels and others both above and below, to the Mother of Heaven and thence to Him who had taken her up. Yet we fittingly returned to her, ‘excellent as the Sun’, and sounding so. Hierarchies of music and theology created and reinforced one another, preparing us, so it seemed, for further, Christmas mysteries.

Sixtieth birthday concert for Irvine Arditti, 16 October 2013

Wigmore Hall

 

Ferneyhough – Intermedia alla ciaconna

Robert HP Platz – strings (Echo VII) (UK premiere)
Hilda Paredes – Cuerdas del destino (UK premiere)
Francisco Guerrero – Zayin I + II
Cage – Eight Whiskus
Akira Nishimura – String Quartet no.5, ‘Shesha’ (world premiere)

Irvine Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violins)

Ralf Ehlers (viola)

Lucas Fels (cello)

 

To say that the world of contemporary music owes Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet an incalculable debt, whilst true, somewhat misses the point; we might be better to say that of the world of music. The Ardittis occasionally venture back even beyond Schoenberg; indeed, I heard them play Beethoven in Edinburgh, and, in an interview with me shortly before those performances, Arditti referred to Bach and Brahms too. But it is the twin abilities to present classics, albeit mostly of the twentieth century, as contemporary, and to present new works in a manner both excitingly of the moment and with all the insight that one might expect, say, the Amadeus Quartet to lavish on Mozart, that really counts.

 

Ferneyhough’s Intermedio alla ciaccona is a classic by Arditti’s and indeed by anyone’s standards. Twenty-seven years after he gave its 1986 premiere, Arditti ensured that it remained as visceral and as musical an experience as ever. Its ‘fictional polyphony’, to employ the composer’s term, immediately has one think of Bach’s great solo violin example: Bach refracted, in a sense descended from, or at least relatable to, Webern’s great orchestration of the Ricercar from the Musical Offering, yet also quite different, violently so – and of course an entirely new composition. A kaleidoscope of expression unfurls itself nevertheless through the means of a single instrument, within a strong, indeed awe-inspiringly strong, modernist frame. Arditti’s sovereign command as a performer had one believe this to be an experience akin to what I imagine hearing Milstein play Bach might have been. For me, this was perhaps the greatest highlight of a typically exploratory evening.

Robert HP Platz’s 2008 work, strings (Echo VII) received its first British performance. The quartet members gradually enter, one by one, Arditti first, the spatial conceit being their placing around the hall, only the first violin and the cello on stage. In the composer’s words, the piece ‘is a portrait of the four characters in a string quartet, each in his own space, his own time, like four galaxies in polyphonic space, four universes of a meta-universe, to be described by the theory of “strings”.’ I admit that I am not entirely sure what is meant by ‘the theory of “strings”,’ but anyway. It opens with relative reticence and indeed it takes the cello’s entry for the music to turn to what, with doubtless undue Romanticism, I might gingerly call more a passionate tone. Despite spatial separation, or in a sense through its offices, the instruments combine even to the extent of completing each other’s phrases. (Again, I thought of Webern.) It was not quite clear to me what the spatial element added; not that there was anything to which to object. But it was not quite Stockhausen either.

Hilda Parades’s Cuerdas del destino (2007-8) also received its British premiere. From the éclat of its opening pizzicati, via an array of expressive devices such as glissando tremolo and harmonics, and a succession of contrasting types of musical material, this made for a vivid, at times almost, though only almost, pictorial journey. There is a palpable sense of drama to the work – as there was to the quartet’s committed performance. The concluding section seemed both old – recognisable material from what had gone before – and new, that material being employed in different ways. It registered almost as a translation of a cyclical symphonic principle to the world of the contemporary string quartet: not entirely unlike the Arditti Quartet’s very raison d’être.

Francisco Guerrero’s Zayin cycle of seven pieces for string trio, written over the period 1983 to 1997, has yet to be performed in its entirety in this country. The first two pieces certainly made a powerful impression, whetting the appetite for more, the powerful energy inherent in both works and performances offering something of a revelation. Motor rhythms, post-Stravinskian in the best sense, offer again an array of expressive possibilities. At one point, the way in which the instruments seemed, as it were, to be pedalling uphill offered an analogy with which to grasp the music’s progression, but the best thing perhaps, especially on a first hearing, was simply to surrender. The virtuosity and musicality unleashed in performance were second to none.

Arditti then performed a solo work that could hardly have been more contrasted had it been taken from a much earlier century; arguably Cage’s Eight Whiskus is still more contrasted than, say, Bach or Biber. Apparently it follows on from an original version for voice, which Cage, in consultation with the violinist Malcolm Goldstein, reworked so that ‘the vowel and consonant qualities of the poem are transformed into various bowing positions, gradations of bowing pressure, and forms of articulation’. A fascinating idea, no doubt, yet what struck me was the apparently disarming simplicity of the piece: probably an illusion, but maybe not. I do not think, moreover, it was fanciful to glean some sense of translation from words to violin technique, even when one had no idea what the original text was.

Finally came the world premiere of Akiraa Nishimura’s firth string quartet, written to commemorate Arditti’s sixtieth birthday and dedicated to him. ‘Shesha’ refers, in the composer’s words, ‘to the name of a gigantic snake with thousands of heads , which appears in the Indian myth. It lives beneath the ground and supports the earth. Shesha’s awakening means the earth’s awakening.’ Indeed, without at the time having read the note, I sensed something of a kinship in the first section, that of Shesha’s awakening, to The Rite of Spring, intense and teeming with life. The apparent Romanticism – a relative term, I admit – of what followed was certainly impressive in terms of the Arditti Quartet’s performance, but sounded perhaps slightly as a reversion, even if one could hardly say to what. Perhaps, though, that was the point, as the second and third sections evoked ‘Samudra manthan’ (the churning of the ocean of milk) and ‘Amrita’ (the nectar of immortal life). What seemed as though it might be the still centre of the work actually proved to be its conclusion: an interesting confounding of expectations, even if those expectations were only mine. At any rate, the concert left us in no doubt that both Irvine Arditti and the quartet that bears his name will continue both to exceed and to confound our expectations.