Suspended Songs of Suffering: Gesualdo, Rihm, Nono

Transalpine Tendencies

To view the relationship between Italian and German music as the fundamental driving force of modern Western musical history would be a gross oversimplification. However, in Salzburg of all places, ‘the Rome of the North’, it is a temptation that might be forgiven. It was here, after all, not long after the original 1608 premiere, that Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo received its first performances outside Italy, at more or less the same time as the foundation stone was laid for the new Cathedral (in 1614). Salzburg’s crucial importance as a staging post for the northward progress of the Italian Baroque, architectural and musical, renders it an especially apt home for this concert, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s Kollegienkirche, built between 1694 and 1707, in turn an especially apt venue, steeped in the tradition of Francesco Borromini and Gianlorenzo Bernini. Yet, just as we should rightly cavil at speaking of the Salzburg of the 17th or 18th centuries as ‘Austrian’ – ‘German’ is closer to the mark, if still misleading – so should we be wary of straightforwardly ascribing ‘Italian’ status to the southern culture from which many of its treasures had sprung.

Kollegienkirche, this summer

Gesualdo’s Pardon

Stepping back another century, we might ask how meaningful it is to call Carlo Gesualdo an ‘Italian’ composer. It is perhaps inevitable that we should do so with hindsight. So long as we are clear that Renaissance Italy had little conception of nationhood comparable to our own, it will do no harm. Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, Gesualdo came from the south, from the Kingdom of Naples, although he also spent time in Ferrara and Rome. By the time Gesualdo came to write his late Tenebrae Responsories, however, he was largely a recluse, confined to his estate in ‘melancholy’. It was Gesualdo’s uncle, Cardinal Carlo (St Charles) Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, who had suggested in Gesualdo’s youth that sacred music might be written in a less conservative, more madrigalian fashion. Borromeo increasingly became an object of veneration for Gesualdo. A 1609 altarpiece commissioned from Giovanni Balducci for the Capuchin church on the Gesualdo estate, Santa Maria delle Grazie, brings together in sacra conversazione Borromeo (canonized the following year), Gesualdo, his second wife Leonora and their dead son’s purified soul. 1611 saw publication of his Tenebrae Responsories, written with private performance in mind beneath that image: Il perdono di Gesualdo.

There is something especially intimate to these 27 motets, from which we shall hear but four: intimate in their relative emotionalism, far more readily associated with single motets than with such collections. Counter-Reformation Italy heard many such settings of combined offices of Matins and Lauds for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday: the ‘triduum sacrum’, heard in the dark shadow, ‘in tenebris’, of their preceding evenings. Laden with grief, Gesualdo’s expression – anachronistically, ‘expressionism’ – is less exaggerated in these six-voice settings than in his more overtly experimental madrigals, yet perhaps more distilled, more integrated, such has often tended to be the way with music for the church. It is difficult, however, and perhaps impossible, even undesirable, to dissociate the travails of Gesualdo’s life and suffering entirely from their style and content. Suffering, betrayal, agony here seem both present and sublimated: a musical act of contrition to accompany, even to intensify, the scene in the altarpiece above.

Gesualdo Beyond the Grave

Varieties of Gesualdo’s notoriety, be it autobiographical or musical, have by now been rendered more or less indistinguishable. Aristocratic licence – Gesualdo had no need of a patron – helps provide some connection for the composer perhaps still known best for having murdered his first wife and her lover in flagrante. We should probably concede that, whether we like it or not, our Gesualdo, as man, composer, or both, is in many ways a different figure from the Gesualdo of his own time. There is nothing wrong with that; we might speak similarly of any artist of the past, from Machaut to Webern and beyond. At any rate, the Gesualdo of scandals personal and artistic has inspired many composers since his 20th-century rediscovery: among them, Peter Warlock, Igor Stravinsky, Peter Maxwell Davies, Alfred Schnittke, Salvatore Sciarrino, Georg Friedrich Haas and Hilda Parades. Rihm’s Seven Passion Texts (2001–6, later published with instrumental interludes as Vigilia) takes its place in this tradition: knowing, intentional response to Gesualdo’s responsories, likewise for six voices.

Speaking with God

Gianni Vattimo

Rihm described himself in 2006 as ‘one who does not pray, but speaks with God’, and has turned to setting sacred texts increasingly since the Millennium. He also, not uncommonly among artists, had childhood dreams of the priesthood. Composer Peter Bannister has enlighteningly compared Rihm to the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, a writer with strong Marxist and Roman Catholic strands to his thinking. Bannister asks whether Rihm’s ‘harmonic idiom in these pieces’ may be heard analogously ‘to Vattimo’s “weak thought”’, the thought of a ‘self-confessed “half-believer”’, in that ‘his language suggests directionality and simultaneously subverts it at every stage, hinting at “strong structures” but scrupulously avoiding them’. There is certainly reference as well as affinity to be found in these motets to the glories of polyphony. As often with Rihm, there are tonal affinities too, sometimes more oblique than others. Even at their strongest, though, as perhaps in ‘Tristis est anima mea’, one would never mistake them for the once-fashionable ‘spirituality’ of so-called ‘holy minimalism’.

This is not the fervent belief of a Messiaen, perhaps not belief at all, but it is of a piece with Rihm’s ongoing fascination with music and practices of the past. To quote Edward Campbell, Rihm has ‘no compunction in juxtaposing music […] flagrantly modernist in aesthetic alongside passages that cut deeply into the DNA of the German Romantic tradition’. Here, another tradition too, albeit seen and heard through a Romantic-modernist prism. For Rihm, moreover, the Holocaust inevitably casts a particular, as well as universal shadow, over tales and rites of suffering. In his Deus Passus, written for the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death in 2000, his new St Luke Passion came strikingly to an unfulfilled close with Paul Celan’s poem Tenebrae. That may surely be felt here in a chromaticism unfulfilled because it cannot be.

Music of Resistance and Liberation

Rihm has freely acknowledged the importance of Luigi Nono for his music too, helping – as so often in the dialectic between German and Italian music – impart a clarity of line often welcome among the thickets of German post-expressionism. The kinship between Nono’s and Rihm’s Hölderlin fragments is clear to all, but Nono’s importance as ‘a model I cherish’ has clearly been broader, Rihm going so far as to call Nono ‘the prototypical artist, searching and failing, extremely secure and extremely insecure’, calling particular attention to the ‘ecstasy’ of Nono’s ‘sound language’.

Image: Archivio Luigi Nono

A Venetian by birth, in 1924, and death, in 1990, Nono evinced considerable interest in early ‘Italian’, often Venetian, music; his final music drama, Prometeo, often conjuring up the impression of a marriage between Marx and Palestrina and other late polyphonists, Gesualdo included, mediated by Walter Benjamin and Nono’s librettist, Massimo Cacciari. For, as Nono’s friend and colleague Claudio Abbado attested, Nono ‘never lost the deep-rooted ties to the long tradition of Venetian music […] Gigi’s sense of an espressivo or cantabile line also stems from this tradition’. Nono’s studies at the Venice Conservatory with Gian Francesco Malipiero had encompassed study of earlier traditions. Sheer delight in vocal writing and the potential of the human voice, would inform Nono’s work throughout his life, nowhere more so than in the 1955–6 cantata Il canto sospeso. Nono would recall in 1973 that Malipiero had been:

A lovingly concerned master, as I learned when he took me as a pupil during the bestial rule of fascism (from 1943 to 1945) and in his courses and seminars opened the door to study and knowledge of music which at that time lay prohibited in Italy: Schoenberg, Webern, also Dallapiccola, and naturally Monteverdi and the music of the Italian Renaissance.

This setting of texts from European resistance fighters unites all such strands, Il canto sospeso being, again to quote Abbado, ‘music born of deep dismay, painful and accusing’. Every work, for Nono, required what he called ‘a human “provocation”: an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness’. Each of the texts we hear offers testimony from a resistance fighter shortly to be killed by the Nazis. There is here a glowing post-Romanticism: painful, even agonizing, in its beauty, nowhere more so than in the sixth movement, when, after what we may think of as a choral Dies irae without end – remembrance of Esther Srul, a victim of Operation Barbarossa – orchestral music beguiles perhaps all too readily. Words, witness, their horror nonetheless continue to resist their aestheticization. The Webern-like tenor aria-with-ensemble in which we hear from Chaim, a 14-year-old Jew from Galicia, or the ravishing melismatic writing for soprano in particular, suggest promise that cannot, should not, be fulfilled. We await, wish for reconciliation, even benediction, but know, with Nono – as, with Rihm, perhaps even with Gesualdo – that it will not, cannot happen. For the ‘wedge’ quality to Nono’s 12-note row, intervals gradually broadening out – heard in linear fashion for the first time in the fourth movement – recalls certain Bach fugues, but also, tellingly here, Dallapiccola’s beacon of (false) hope in his anti-fascist opera Il prigioniero. We must hope, even if we have few grounds for doing so.

That said, words find themselves liberated from the tyranny of expectations. Broken down into constituent parts, as well as savoured melismatically, there is music to be experienced here that goes beyond the serial parameters of pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics, and so on. Nono’s point here was not, as his fellow avant-gardist Stockhausen believed, to divest the text of meaning; it was not ‘to withdraw it from the public eye where it has no place’. In his 1960 Darmstadt lecture, Text – Musik – Gesang, as transcribed by his pupil Helmut Lachenmann, Nono explicitly took issue with that very claim, having looked at Schubert, Monteverdi, Schoenberg, Bach, Gabrieli and others, proceeding to relish one particular an instance of Gesualdo’s madrigal word-setting – the word ‘splende’ in Il sol, qual or più splende – as a presentiment of his own: sounds verbal, phonetic, and musical created a ‘pluridimensional whole’, a counterpoint of sounds in musical declamation.

‘The final unity’ for Nono nonetheless remained in words rather than syllables or parts thereof. In a sense, it is the old controversy concerning polyphony and verbal comprehension, familiar to all students of Palestrina and the Council of Trent (or of Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina). Some controversies, quite rightly, never die, not least those in the endlessly fascinating relationships – however understood or misunderstood, however constructed or deconstructed – between German, Italian and countless other musics, between the art and thought of other times and our own.

(This essay was first published in a 2019 Salzburg Festival programme for a concert from the SWR Vokalensemble, SWR SO, Marcus Creed, and Peter Rundel.)

Britten Sinfonia (Voices)/Dougan - 'Easter Voices': works by Mozart, Stravinsky, et al., 28 March 2018

Milton Court

Andrea Gabrieli: Maria stabat ad monumentum

Stravinsky: Fanfare for a New Theatre
Mozart: Missa Brevis in F major, KV 192186f, interspersed with:
Stravinsky: Pater Noster and Ave Maria
Salonen: Concert étude, for French horn
Bruckner: Aequale no.1, for three trombones
Gesualdo: Two movements from Tenebrae Responsories for Good Friday
Stravinsky: Mass

Ben Goldscheider (French horn)

Britten Sinfonia Voices
Britten Sinfonia
Eamonn Dougan (conductor)

It was a little early, perhaps, to be hearing ‘Easter Voices’ in the middle of Holy Week. However, this was not especially an Easter programme – and, in any case, included two pieces from Gesualdo’s Tenebrae responsories for Good Friday. Given the continued vileness of the weather, a little foreshadowing of something warmer was in any case most welcome. (Yes, I know: I should hang my head in Lenten shame.)

Andrea Gabrieli’s Maria stabat ad monumentum functioned splendidly as an introit: Mary Magdalene weeping at the tomb, telling the angels ‘they have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid Him’. It cautioned us against the adoption of anachronistic models of ‘expressiveness’. This is no heart-on-sleeve lament, nor was it in performance. Britten Sinfonia Voices, under Eamonn Dougan offered a warm, nicely flowing account, the choral sound recognisably ‘English’, no doubt, but there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Who on earth, or indeed beyond, knows what the composer’s ‘intentions’ were here, in any case? The very question most likely makes no sense. He would surely have been astonished to hear that the piece was being performed in a London ‘concert hall’ in 2018, let alone that someone was writing about that on a ‘computer’, that writing soon to be posted on a noticeboard on which, in theory, anyone on God’s earth would be able to read it, although most would not.

The same, of course, would go for Mozart, and parts of it would at least have been a stretch for Stravinsky. Their music formed the twin pillars of this concert, the rest of the first half given over to Mozart’s F major Missa brevis, KV 192186f, introduced by and interspersed with short pieces by Stravinsky, the second half offering pieces by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Bruckner, and Gesualdo, leading up to a performance of Stravinsky’s Mass. Both masses were written, ‘intended’ for liturgical performance, although Stravinsky would not have been so greatly surprised to hear of concert performance, however much he might have affected to disdain it, or indeed genuinely done so.

His 1964 Fanfare for a New Theatre heralded ‘the start of the concert proper’, according to Dougan, quoted in Jo Kirkbride’s booklet note. Written for the opening of the New York State Theater, it proved, as ever, blazing, uncompromising, in its forty-second-odd, post-Webern character, whilst at the same time having one wonder: might that actually be a passing reference to Monteverdi? Probably not: one just thinks of Orfeo anyway. In any case, no one time-travels quite like Stravinsky; no one ever remains so much himself. Stravinsky’s Pater Noster and Ave Maria, following Mozart’s ‘Gloria’ and ‘Credo’ respectively, spoke, almost unmediated – or such was the trick. The composer would surely have approved. Choral blend was impeccable, the words highly audible. (Both were given in their later, Latin versions, as per their 1949 revision.) The former sounded a little more Russian, perhaps, as if a neo-Classical remembrance of the world he had left, the latter whiter still, with a strong sense of a musical ‘object’, a Stravinskian icon.

Stravinsky notoriously affected disapproval of Mozart’s early masses: ‘Rococo-operatic sweets of sin,’ he called them, having discovered some scores in 1942: ‘I knew I had to write a Mass of my own,’ he continued, ‘but a real one’. Give me a fake one any day – as well, of course, as Stravinskian ‘reality’. Classical sacred music, whether that of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, or others, less canonical, is woefully un-performed, with the signal exception of Mozart’s Requiem and perhaps, though only perhaps, the Mass in C minor. Granted, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis is not a work for every day. But many of Mozart’s and Haydn’s masses and other works are just that – or should be. Here we heard a small-scale performance of the Missa brevis: small choir, with soloists drawn from it, two violins, cello, double bass, chamber organ, and occasionally, those two Stravinskian trumpets.  This was, not unreasonably, the sound world, if hardly the acoustic, of the church sonata, slightly augmented. It worked well in a small hall with nothing of the ‘Rococo-operatic’ to it. One can always go to Salzburg’s churches for that.

Performances were again generally warm, if occasionally less so – an interpretative decision, no doubt – from the solo strings. Words again were crystal clear. I especially liked the rich timbre of Tim Dickinson’s bass, but all solos and ensembles were well sung indeed; a fine balance between solo line and blend. The culminatory nature of the ‘Amen’ in the ‘Gloria’; the learned counterpoint of the ‘Credo’, whose contrapuntal tag has one think, whether one likes it or no, of the Jupiter Symphony; the nimble ‘Osanna’ music; and the darkness of the imploring harmonies of the ‘Agnus Dei’, which yet hung over the concluding ‘Dona nobis pacem’: such were just some of the highlights of a lovely performance, well shaped, without interventionism, by Dougan.

Salonen’s 2000 Concert étude for solo French horn, a homage to his teacher, Holger Fransman, offered an equally refreshing opening to the second half, not least given the outstanding, indeed mesmeric quality of Ben Goldscheider’s performance. It acted here almost like a wordless second introit, Messiaen heard from another, related world. The twin requirements of a single line and, at times, multiple voices (various extended techniques, including singing a line in addition to that played) were handled beautifully and, more to the point, meaningfully. The first of Bruckner’s two Aequale followed from the gallery, rooted in tradition and yet, in both melody and harmonic implications, unmistakeably Bruckner.

Gesualdo’s weird chromaticism – is that the best way to think about it at all? – stood out, without undue exaggeration, in carefully unfolding performances of ‘Omnes amici mei’ and ‘Vinea mea electa’. The former proved, perhaps, more of an object, almost in the Stravinskian sense, the latter more developmental, opening in chaster fashion, yet blossoming. Is this how such music, such words ‘should’ be performed? Who knows? Again, the question is hardly the right one to ask. One could certainly imagine what might have fascinated Stravinsky in this composer’s music.

And so to his ‘proper’ Mass, with its non-string, wind orchestra. I was interested to read Dougan speak of ‘the more lush sound world of the winds and brass in the Stravinsky’, as compared to Mozart’s strings. I hear it the other way around – and did again. Although this was anything but a cold performance, an austere, even angular quality, with roots in Symphonies of wind instruments nevertheless manifested itself. We all have our own Stravinskys, I suppose; yet, as Boulez, once put it, Stravinsky demeure (the title of his Rite of Spring analysis).  Is there, was there, something ‘Oriental’, or at least ‘Orientalist’, in the opening wind and vocal arabesques of the ‘Gloria’? Or is/was that just recollections of Paris? Whatever it might have ‘been’, it was delightful. The ‘Credo’ perhaps spoke a little, yet only a little, more nostalgically, of a service from ‘home’ now once again viewed or heard as an ‘object’, its jangle of ecclesiastical Latin leading inexorably to a beautifully floated Amen. Intonation throughout was spot on, as it must be, truly permitting one to appreciate the originality of Stravinsky’s own heavenly host in the ‘Sanctus’ and the  imploring qualities of the closing ‘Agnus Dei’. As a surprising encore, another object of fascination, we heard Mozart’s Ave verum corpus motet, with accompaniment from the wind orchestra on stage: Mozart and Stravinsky, perhaps, united at last.

'Io morirò d’Amore’: La Compagnia del Madrigale: Marenzio, Monteverdi, and Gesualdo, 7 February 2016

Wigmore Hall

 

Marenzio – Io morirò d’Amore

Monteverdi – Anima mia, perdona
Gesualdo – T’amo mia vita
Marenzio – Cruda Amarilli
Monteverdi – Ecco mormorar l’onde
Marenzio – Filli, volgendo i lumi
Gesualdo – O dolorosa gioia
Marenzio – Dura legge d’Amor
Gesualdo – O dolce mio tesoro
Monteverdi – Ecco, Silvio, colei
Gesualdo – Al mio gioir il ciel si fa sereno
Monteverdi – Dolcemente dormiva la mia Clori
Marenzio – Vivrò dunque lontano
Gesualdo – Chiaro risplender suole
Monteverdi – Cruda Amarilli
Gesualdo – Moro lasso al mio duolo

Rossana Bertini, Francesca Cassinari (sopranos)

Elena Carzaniga (contralto)
Giuseppe Maletto (tenor)
Raffaele Giordani, Daniele Carnovich (basses)
 

There was no doubting the musical and verbal acuity of these performances from La Compagnia del Madrigale, making their Wigmore Hall debut here. I struggled to put my finger on what I felt might have been missing; the audience certainly responded warmly, and I felt that I learned a great deal both from the programming and the performances. It would be foolish, of course, to expect madrigals such as these to blaze in the same way that, for instance, Monteverdi’s later, concerted works do. Perhaps that was part of my difficulty; perhaps it was also a matter of my own lack of intimacy with the Italian language, for these are unquestionably ‘literary’, connoisseur’s pieces, in which understanding the meaning of the words is only a small part of the battle. All of which is really a way of saying that, if at times I felt a little more enthusiastic than many, if at times I longed for a little more of the way in almost clichéd ‘Italianate’ colour, the fault most likely lay with me rather than with the performances.

 

Luca Marenzio’s Io morirò d’Amore gave its name to the concert as a whole, and made for a splendid intrada. The idea of proceeding to die for love coloured the texts and much of the music of what followed. There was an overwhelming sadness, lightly worn yet unmistakeable, to Monteverdi’s Anima mia, perdona, one of a number of settings of Giovanni Battista Guarini. I was put in mind, not for the last time, of the composer’s Orfeo, seemingly but a stone’s throw away. The singers’ colouring of individual notes and phrases, here and elsewhere, seemed to fit seamlessly into awareness and communication of the shape of the poem and its setting. Gesualdo’s T’amo mia vita, also a Guarini setting, offered pleasing musico-poetic symmetry – ‘“T’amo mia vita” la mia cara vita’ – within a life that had been lived. That madrigal and the ensuing Marenzio Cruda Amarilli (Guarini again), offered a variety of vocal textures, again within a convincing poetic whole; the performance of the latter was beautifully unhurried, indeed ‘aristocratic’, to use that almost unavoidable word.

 

For me, it was Monteverdi’s Tasso setting from his Second Book, Ecco mormorar l’onde, which was perhaps the highlight of the concert: we witnessed, it seemed, a strange, quickening marriage, in work and performance, between tradition and innovation. Already, with the advantage and disadvantage of hindsight, there stood hear the father of musical modernity, at least as strongly entitled to that accolade as Haydn. And yet, there was courtliness too. The whole world seemed a stage. The individuality and complementarity of voices, again in work and in performance, contributed greatly to our enchantment.

 

Chiaroscuro was much on my mind in Marenzio’s Filli, volgendo i lumi, continuing with Tasso, in an almost painterly performance. The sado-masochism of Gesualdo’s text in O dolorosa gioia was matched and, I think, pierced by his musical chromaticism; more than once, I thought not only of crucifixion but also of the sweet assurance of atonement. The final compositional and performative twist on ‘vivo’ was something surely to be relished. Finally, in the first half, Marenzio’s Petrarch setting, Dura legge d’Amor! Had us feel the harshness of its title and text without exaggeration: courtly lovesickness, one might say. Collegiality and amorous sparring were hallmarks of the performance, within an overarching context of the melancholic. The words ‘Come senza languir si more e langue’ offered a desolate close indeed.

 

Gesualdo returned after the interval, with his O dolce mio tesoro. I loved tracking the progress, often eccentric, of individual lines in relation to others, all within the framework of the composer’s bizarre mood-swings. ‘Romantic’? Maybe, maybe not. At any rate, the strangeness was brought subtly to life. Monteverdi’s lengthy Guarini setting (Book V), Ecco, Silvio, colei was subtly – that word again – and persuasively shaped. It was here, above all, that I missed something a little stronger, more interventionist; however, as I said, I suspect that the performers were in the right and that I simply need to immerse myself more in this repertoire. Two of the three Gesualdo settings remaining, Al mio gioir il ciel si fa sereno and Chiaro risplender suole, benefited from warm precision: a faithful guide through compositional surprises. Monteverdi’s Dolcemente dormiva la mia Clori and Cruda Amarilli (a nice counterpart to Marenzio’s setting, heard in the first half) offered a multiplicity of ‘voices’, even of emotions; but quite rightly, one had to make the effort as listener to hear them all. A rich-toned performance of Marenzio’s rich-toned Vivrò dunque lontanto was clearly founded, again rightly, upon verbal nuance.

Finally, we heard Gesualdo’s Moro lasso al mio duolo. Its opening chromaticism – if we can call it that, I know… – led to still stranger music, reminding me of the composer’s attraction for Stravinsky. Quite what one should make of it, I am not at all sure, but its instability was subtly – again – represented, without any need of exaggeration. In the spirit of the concert as a whole, the performers paid Gesualdo the compliment of treating his madrigal as music rather than as effect.

 

 

 

The EXAUDI Italian Madrigal Book – A Tenth Birthday Celebration, 21 October 2012

Wigmore Hall

Andrea Gabrieli – Vieni, vieni Himeneo

Sciarrino – Tre madrigal
Monteverdi – Sovra tenere erbette
Io mi son giovinetta
Larry Goves – Sherpa Tensing stands up from the piano, says something quiet, and walks outside (world premiere)
Christian Wolff – Ashbery Madrigals (world premiere)
Monteverdi - Vattene pur crudel
Gesualdo – ‘Mercè!’, grido piangendo
Asciugate i begli occhi
Morgan Hayes – E Vesuvio monte
Gesualdo – Ardita Zanzaretta
Languisce al fin
Evan Johnson – Three in, ad abundantiam (world premiere)
Michael Finnissy – Sesto Libro di Carlo Gesualdo I (world premiere)
Monteverdi – Rimanti in pace

EXAUDI
James Weeks (conductor)

This tenth birthday celebration for the EXAUDI consort, founded in 2002 by James Weeks and Juliet Fraser, commendably looked forward rather than back, by presenting the first performances of four new commissioned works, ‘the first tranche,’ to quote Weeks’s programme note, ‘of what we hope will become a long-term enterprise: the creation of a book of (mainly) Italian madrigals, each by a different composer. Our aim is to discover what the idea of “the madrigal” might offer the present day, either as a concrete historical phenomenon or as a set of more general principles: principles perhaps to do with the relationships between individual voices or the singers themselves, or to do with the idea of vocal expression, or simply to do with the humanist, secular impulses underlying the genre.’

 

The door is thus left pretty much open for composers to do as they will; whether something a little more prescriptive might have been in order, only time will tell. I perhaps responded more readily to those works more recognisably ‘madrigalian’, but that is doubtless a different, personal matter. (One should recall that the form had died out before and been reinvented more or less from scratch, fourteenth- and sixteenth-century madrigals possessing little in common beyond the name.) Michael Finnissy’s Sesto Libro di Carlo Gesualdo I is in a sense a transcription of Gesualdo’s Se la mia morte, dividing the six voices into two competing trios, one amplified. The dark, at times almost neo-expressionist, harmonies (or should that, in Gesualdo’s case, be palaeo-expressionist, since our terms of reference are certainly not his?) proved attractive for singers and audience alike. Evan Johnson’s Three in, ad abundantiam, sets fragments from Petrarch, apparently aiming to express difficulty or reluctance to communicate. I found it muted, fragmentary, for want of a better word, but ultimately perhaps not very interesting. Initially, I was unsure whether the intervention of a mobile telephone and ensuing conversation between one singer and the offending member of the audience, was part of the work or not; perhaps it ought to be incorporated.

 

Larry Goves’s Sherpa Tensing stands up from the piano, says something quiet, and walks outside sets a lengthy, repetitive text by Matthew Welton, to which the musical response seems deliberately sectional. Though in English, it retains another characteristic of the Italian madrigal: the privileged position of words. Christian Wolff’s Ashbery Madrigals seem concerned with quotidian experience in setting as well as text, though they are not without attractive enough harmonies; performance certainly lent them fine chiaroscuro.

 

Salvatore Sciarrino and Morgan Hayes offered examples of recently written works, which were not yet part of the EXAUDI project as such. Sciarrino’s Tre madrigal set Japanese haiku (Matsuo Bashō) in the composer’s own translation, itself apparently preparative of the Mediterranean sensibility with which the notes are imbued. Waves murmur, a cicada, bells, red sun, and winds appear. In performance – and presumably to a certain extent in score – we heard a post-Berio marriage of roughness and sophistication, intensifying the impression of Italian Renaissance roots. This for me sounded the finest or at least the most inviting of the ‘new’ works, but I am speaking from but a single hearing. Morgan Hayes’s E Vesuvio monte opts, as the title suggests, for Latin rather than Italian, setting Pliny the Younger’s description of the eruption of Vesuvius. A brace of countertenors comes to the fore, lending the narration a sense both of old and of new. The violence of antiquity is felt; whilst never sounding ‘like’ Birtwistle, that spirit, so inherent in the older composer’s work, sounded almost reimagined here – though that of course may well be a matter of me finding bearings rather than intent or indeed practice.

 

Andrea Gabrieli’s Vieni, vieni Himeneo had offered a well-chosen introduction, a welcome to performers and performance. The rest of the programme was devoted to Gesualdo and Monteverdi, avant-gardists both. Monteverdi’s Third and Fourth Books were raided, his voice unmistakeable in Sovra tenere erbette, redolent of both opera and choral music, and yet differently tender in the progress of its melodic lines and the harmonies created. Io mi son giovinetta was florid yet neither smudged nor merely ‘ornamental’, benefiting from a fine sense of harmonic direction. Vattene pur, crudel certainly marked itself out at the end of the first half as the masterpiece that it is. It seemed informed, or at least its opening did, by a more modernistic style of performance than had hitherto been heard in the Monteverdi works, though that did not preclude warmth. If here, as in the closing Rimanti in pace, I should sometimes have preferred performances a little more Italianate in spirit, the plangency of the latter arguably making it sound disconcertingly close to Couperin at times, then the chromaticism of the former remained searingly apparent, especially in those descending lines throughout the ensemble.

 

Extremity was embraced from the opening exclamation of Gesualdo’s ‘Mercè!’, grido piangendo, the sheer weirdness of the composer’s writing apparent, in no sense tonally explicable and yet sounding with necessity rather than in merely arbitrary fashion. Whereas Monteverdi in retrospect came to sound almost Mozartian, or at least classicistic, in his perfection, Gesualdo sounded more experimental, whether for better or for worse. If Ardita zanzanetta is almost skittish by his standards, the sense of split personality was still powerfully conveyed. The refusal to milk the ending of Languisce al fin was admirable.

 

Many happy returns, then, to an enterprising and highly accomplished ensemble!

Proms Summer Matinee 3: I Fagiolini/Britten Sinfonia/Wigglesworth - Dowland, Britten, Gesualdo, Dean, Monteverdi, and Olivero, 21 August 2010

Cadogan Hall

Dowland – Flow, my tears
Britten – Lachrymae: Reflections on a song of Dowland, for viola and orchestra
Gesualdo – Responsories of the Office of Tenebrae for Maundy Thursday – II: ‘Tristis est animas mea’
Gesualdo – Sixth Book of Madrigals: ‘Moro, lasso, al mio duolo’
Brett Dean – Carlo
Monteverdi – Madrigali guerreri et amorosi: ‘Lamento della ninfa’
Monteverdi – L’Orfeo – Act II, Messenger Scene
Betty Olivero – Neharot, Neharot (United Kingdom premiere)

Lawrence Power (viola)
Ian Watson (accordion)
I Fagiolini
Robert Hollingworth (director)
Britten Sinfonia
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)


Preliminaries out of the way as quickly as possible: first, the innovation of Proms Saturday Matinees at the Cadogan Hall is welcome, and programming appears to have been liberated by the smaller space; second, programme booklets could do with greater attention. Though free of charge, a welcome change from the excessive prices charged at the Royal Albert Hall for what is often little more than a collection of advertisements, that ‘little more’ at the main venue at least includes a modicum of information concerning works and composers. Texts and translations are provided, as are biographical notes on the performers, but it is a controversial hierarchy that considers them more important than works. There is, admittedly, a degree of spoken introduction, but I heard a few members of the audience comment that they would have liked to know who Brett Dean was. It is, moreover, not mere pedantry to wish that Monteverdi’s ‘Lamento della ninfa’ had been ascribed to his eighth book of madrigals, Gesualdo’s madrigal to his sixth book, and so forth.

As I said, the matinee programmes seem more intelligently constructed than some of their ‘big brothers’ in Kensington Gore. This concert examined three twentieth- and twenty-first century responses to ‘early’ or ‘Renaissance’ music: both descriptions beg more questions than they answer, but the same could be said of any categorisation. Dowland’s Flow, my tears thus preceded Britten’s Lachrymae. Clare Wilkinson sang, to Eligio Quinteiro’s sensitive, musicianly accompaniment on theorbo. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that Quinteiro impressed more consistently than his ‘soloist’. Wilkinson adopted a very ‘Early Music’ style of voice: strictly no vibrato, but little modulation in any respect. More worryingly, there were a couple of occasions on which her breath ran out before her words, leading to faltering at the ends of lines. Diction, however, was impeccable, and by the end of the song, we had become attuned to Dowland’s characteristic melancholy.

His tears flowed into Britten’s Lachrymae, which I had heard the Britten Sinfonia perform in Cambridge in 2008. The orchestra has been extremely fortunate in its viola soloists: first Maxim Rysanov, now Lawrence Power. Once again, I was struck by the way in which Britten’s music finds its voice, emerging out of something between nothingness and Dowland’s music. Melancholy has not only transposed but transmuted. I was also again reminded of Britten’s kinship with Berg: not just the Violin Concerto, whose Bach chorale foreshadows the full statement of Dowland at the end of Britten’s work, but also the febrile writing for string orchestra, suggestive of the Lyric Suite, blossoming under the firm yet generous hand of Ryan Wigglesworth. Moments of ecstasy raised the temperature in a gripping, arguably more dramatic account than that I had heard in Cambridge: both were fine performances, with similar and different virtues. There was not a hint of the intonational difficulties that can sometimes plague performances of works such as this. If only all ‘Early Music’ were performed with the passionate commitment devoted to the Britten…

The next pairing was Gesualdo and Dean. Gesualdo was presented in sacred and profane modes: the ‘Tristis est anima mea’ from his Tenebrae Responses, followed by the madrigal, probably to his own vers, ‘Moro, lasso, al mio duolo’. Christ’s words from Gethsemane, heard as the lights go out on Maundy Thursday, were given a very English reading by I Fagiolini. Hints of something more Italianate upon the word ‘fugam’, referring to the disciples’ flight, were more than balanced by a restraint that had more in common with Choral Evensong than Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Many works can take different performing ‘voices’, and I think Gesualdo’s can, but it was perhaps a pity not to hear something more full-blooded. The madrigal was less restrained, though a degree of vibrato would have imparted some sense of the sensuality the performance lacked. Dissonances and weird melodic twists nevertheless made their mark. However, Robert Hollingworth, the group’s director, is not, on the basis of this performance, possessed of the most ingratiating countertenor voice.

Brett Dean’s Carlo (1997, not that one would know from the booklet) followed, its title implying a response to the man and his scandal – at least to modern audiences – as well as to his music. Nevertheless, the work opens and closes straightforwardly with Gesualdo the composer on tape: the madrigal we had just heard. The downward chromaticism of the madrigal’s opening forms a thread through much of the composition, not least at the end of a glorious orchestral blaze, which put me in mind of a dubiously glorious auto da fé. Falling intervals, hand in hand with a beautifully judged diminuendo, prepared the way ultimately for the final statement of Gesualdo himself. But much had gone on between, all superbly realised by the Britten Sinfonia’s strings under Wigglesworth. Here one heard an ensemble of string soloists, not dissimilar to Richard Tognetti’s Australian Chamber Orchestra, for whom the work was written. The fractures of sampled sound provoked disapproval in a woman sitting in front of me, who turned to all and sundry, hoping, it seemed, to elicit a similar response. Fracture led, however, more often to mediated unity than to further fracture, though the breathy sounds heard later on belied the polite Englishness of the earlier performance. I was a little surprised by the reaction of the American woman seated next to me, who had more than once been politely requested to desist from her distracting fanning during the performance. At one point, she exclaimed, ‘total crap!’ It was still more surprising, then, to see her applaud vigorously at the end of the performance: perhaps she changed her mind; perhaps she was as sane as she was considerate. At any rate, this intriguing piece, which I should be keen to hear again, received a splendidly synchronised performance, complementary in the best sense to the Gesualdo on tape.

Monteverdi and the Israeli composer, Betty Olivero, formed the third and final pairing. Whilst there was none of the exhibitionism that characterises certain modern Italian groups in Monteverdi, there was much less inhibition in I Fagiolini’s performance than there had been in Gesualdo. Emma Tring proved a winning nymph in the lament: a pleasing voice, sensitive to the text and to the music with which it is intertwined. The magic of Monteverdi’s ground bass construction won through, from a continuo group comprising harpsichord (Catherine Pierron), theorbo (Quinteiro, again excellent), and organ (Hollingworth). This led on to the Messenger Scene from L’Orfeo. I Fagiolini’s presentation was somewhat puzzling, in that the Shepherds’ parts were shared out between various singers, confusing the two roles the audience would have seen listed in the programme. There seemed no obvious reason for this – and indeed it highlighted the relative weakness of one particular voice. However, Wilkinson really came into her own here as the Messenger, drawing on a considerably more varied vocal palette than she had employed for the Dowland. Nicholas Hurndall Smith’s Orfeo was not on the grand scale, but he proved as attentive to the text as Tring had in the previous piece. Whatever shortcomings there may have been in the performance, however, the sheer genius of Monteverdi shone through. Gesualdo may have the better biography, but Monteverdi has the infinitely more subtle, more ravishing, more truly dramatic music, even in 1607.

Fast-forward four hundred years to 2007, when Betty Olivero’s Neharot, Neharot was first performed. Distressed by scenes of the Israeli military onslaught upon the Lebanon the previous year, Olivero composed a tribute not only to Monteverdi, but to voices of female suffering. Seeking out such voices from Kurdistan, the Yemen, and elsewhere, she had them recorded by professional Israeli mourners, to provide the tape element for this work. ‘Neharot’, she explained, is the Hebrew for ‘rivers’, so Neharot, Neharot, ‘rivers, rivers,’ might be taken to refer to rivers of tears, rivers of blood. (Tears thus took us back to Dowland and Britten.) Solo viola (Powers again) and accordion (Ian Watson) joined the string orchestra for a clearly committed performance. Olivero considers the viola, not unreasonably, the ‘most intimate’ of the stringed instruments, whilst the accordion is a folk-like ‘voice of humanity’. Certainly the soloists’ performances lived up to these expectations, Powers rhapsodic yet purposeful, Watson soulful yet perhaps hopeful too. Here, of course, it was Monteverdi’s turn to be refracted not only across the centuries, but also geographically. The world of the Mediterranean and beyond is the scene for Olivero’s lament, with hints of the Voci of her teacher, Berio, doubtless drawing on Olivero’s Sephardic upbringing. As with the Dean piece, I should hesitate on the basis of a single hearing to hazard further predictions, but equally, I should be interested to hear the work again, and indeed to hear other works by Olivero. There is an interesting interview between the composer and Jessica Duchen in the Jewish Chronicle (click here).

Once again, then, kudos to the Britten Sinfonia for such imaginative and enlightening programming. Symphony orchestras and concert programmers, please take note…