The Cardinall's Musick Wigmore Hall

Live at the Wigmore Hall - The Cardinall's Miusick, reviewed HERE in Opera Today by Claire Seymour :

"O Maria Deo grata — ‘O Mary, pleasing to God’: so begins Robert Fayrfax’s antiphon, one of several supplications to the Virgin Mary presented in this thought-provoking concert by The Cardinall’s Musick at the Wigmore Hall. 

In the late-medieval period, Christian thinking centred on the belief that the surest route to eternal peace was through the agency of the Blessed Virgin. Choral music repeated invoked her aid; in the Eton Choirbook she is frequently beseeched and, indeed, Eton College had been founded by Henry VI in 1440 as ‘The King’s College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor’. Yet, Tudor dynastic politics was never wholly absent from either the religious or cultural life of the age, as The Cardinall’s Musick under the direction of Andrew Carwood intriguingly revealed."

Fun Winter in Spitalfields

You could spend December with Messiahs back to back. But the Spitalfields Winter Music Festival offers festive cheer and fun music. It even kicks off with a Christmas Market with Outdoor Puppets,  early music, story telling, brass bands and gospel choir. Much livelier than commercial tat. And the money goes to Crisis, to help the homeless, not a remote "theoretical" situation these days. That's the real spirit of Christmas, caring for others.

Lots of singing and community events but Spitalfields isn't the average type of place. It's eclectic! The big event on 16/12 is the 25th anniversary of I Fagiolini: Monteverdi, Striggio, Janequin, Britten and "three musical soufflés".  I Fagiolini under Robert Holllingworth have a reputation for adventure. Early music isn't "safe". Also off the beaten track is Joglaresa's Yoolis on 19/12. Medieval  instruments and quirky medieval humour. "Early music's bit of tough" they describe themselves.

Early music is a Spitalfields thing, but so is contemporary avant garde (it's that kind of neighbourhood). Tickets almost sold out for the London Contemporary Orchestra, whose conductor Hugh Brunt has impressed me a lot in the past. They're doing Claude Vivier Pulau Dewata and Gerard Grisey Vortex  Temporum  Lots about Vivier and Grisey on this site - my favourites!

Even more eclectic is thew Tom Waits Project. Veteran composer Gavin Bryars has created a "circus band" to bring together "ten songs by Tom Waits, two by Kurt Weill, a sea shanty, a hymn, a couple of instrumental gypsy tangos and a classic Fellini film score", This should be very interesting indeed. Bryars's Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet was the first new music surprise I had when I first came to London, but I took to it like a natural. About ten years ago it was recorded again with Tom Waits singing the slurred drunken refrain, instead of the original loop tape of a London tramp. So Bryars and Waits relate to each other well.  Tom Waits is unique. He used to cultivate a street bum persona like someone out of film noir. Now he lives on a ranch near my Dad, but someone like that can't tame at heart. Tom Waits's music is poetry, true art song, but with attitude. Waits himself doesn't deign to tour in London to big houses. So get the experience at Spitalfields.

Oh, and they are doing a Messiah, too!

photo by Steve Cadman

The secret history of Sumer is icumen in

Sumer is icumen in is perhaps the earliest song preserved in manuscript.  It dates from about 1260 and is associated with Reading Abbey (founded 1120) which was destroyed in the Reformation and whose ruins are now a playground for drug addicts and drunks. Quite likely it was copied or transferred to the then brand new university at Oxford at an early stage. The manuscript is a compilation of various different pieces of music of which this is the only early English text. Interesting how even a thousand years ago, Europeans were sharing cultural artefacts. Sumer is icumen in is in the dialect of Wessex, a region stretching from the upper reaches of the Thames to the south coast.  Christianity came here in the mid 7th century, and with that monks, churches and literacy. Saxon churches still remain, oddly squat and simple, compared with later structures. Yet how imposing they must have looked once, rising above fields and woodland.

Sumer is icumen in in is a canon for four or more voices, lower voices interweaving with higher, a charming lilting sound. "Summer is a-coming in, loudly sing cuckoo ! "  And then, "The cow lows after the calf, The bullock stirs, the stag farts, Merrily sing, Cuckoo!" Bucolic medieval humour. Yet there are two texts, the red one in Latin, more conventionally pious and seeming to bear no reelation to the English text.  How were they meant to be interpreted?  Would performers and audiences be aware of both versions? Is the imagery quite as pure as it seems? William of Wycombe, one of the monks who made the compilation was later punished for "incontinence" or rather sex with a nun. That's to be expected, since the church was the only route to an education and a life less gruelling than farm labour or conscription. How much did the secular overlap with the sacred? How strictly were genres defined? Who would have sung this canon, and others, and when? In any case, at this time of year when the woods are bursting with bluebells, and the hedgerows fragrant with elder and cherry, Sumer is acumin in just seems so right.

Early Music is Modern Music - Aldeburgh

Early music is as much part of Aldeburgh as new.  The 19th century Austro-Gedrman tradition has shaped what most people think of as "music", but it's a relatively recent tradition. Think of western music from a wider perspective, and the straitjacket of what music "must" be starts to collapse.  So many modern composers have turned to early music for inspiration that it's a good idea to listen to early music in order to appreciate what modern music is coming from.

In some ways, the Huelgas Ensemble is the Ensemble Intercontemporain of early music. In France, early music is hugely popular and on a more adventurous scale. There's a renaissance in "modern" early music and new commissions, which has hardly touched the Anglophone world. In England, the closest we get is Exaudi, highly recommended! So when the Huelgas Ensemble came to Blythburgh Chiurch (top picture)  as part of the Aldeburgh Festival, it was special.

The Huelgas Ensemble, founded and conducted by Paul Van Nevel in 1970, grew from Schola Cantorum in Basle (where Andreas Scholl trained), so it combines scholarly erudition with extremely refined performance. Think of the great cathedrals, which were built with precision, long before computer aided design.

The Huelgas sang Clemens non Papa (Clement who wasn't a Pope), Orlandus de Lassus,  Thomas Ashewell and Nicolas Gombert, a programme of the 16th century when Europe was going through cataclysmic upheaval, the certainties of the Middle Ages being shattered by new ideas. The serenity and perfection of this music salved souls, if it didn't save them. The Huelgas's purity of tone and carefully woven harmony was beautiful. They didn't stand in rigid lines, but moved in a circle.. Singing in church was about filling space effectively. Later that evening, Pierre Boulez's Dialogue de l'ombre double showed how sound dynamics shape the form of music. IRCAM isn't all that far from the early music.

The concert is being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 online, on demand, internationally from 28 June for 7 days.

No wonder early music speaks to modern composers and modern times so well.  Complexity, but based on sound architecture and detail.  A few years ago, at Orford, near Aldeburgh,  I heard Exaudi sing some of Brian Ferneyhough's complexities, lines crossing each other, tracing and intertracing like medieval vaulting. 

Please have a look at Iron Tongue of Midnight. Some journalist thinks that science proves the human brain cannot cope with the "Difficulty" of modern music. I won't give the original link, because it will send traffic to a fool, but read the link.  If science knows anything about the brain, it's that the brain's potential is so huge, we don't know the beginning of it. Quoting one source is like saying that the world must have been created in seven days, because the Bible says so. Creationism spreads because it's always easier not to make an effort, whatever the rewards. Music evolves, and adapts. But Creationists don't like Evolution, of course..

At Aldeburgh this year there's been a huge focus on science and art, specifically the neurological basis of creativity.  I don't have time to write that up just now, but keep reading, I'll get it done during July. The picture shows what can happen when people refuse to think. All along the Suffolk Coast, the cliffs are crumbling, just like in Peter Grimes. There once was a huge seaport at Dunwich, now hundreds of metres under the sea.  But this church, at Covehithe, wasn't destroyed by the sea but by men, in the Reformation and after.

Virtual tour baroque theatre Český Krumlov

This is the "ceremonial hall scene" in the Royal Theatre of Český Krumlov in Bohemia. There are ten sets of side wings, creating an illusion of depth and space, though the stage is tiny. Scene changes were created by moving side wings as needed, so there were many different sets of wings for different purposes, eg woodland, town, port and even "besieged town" and "prison". Since there was no electricity, elaborate machinery was used. This is of interest in itself because it was state of the art technology at the time.

Český Krumlov is coming to London on April 4th, where parts of it will be on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of the blockbuster exhibition Style in the Age of Magnificence : Baroque 1620-1800 which perhaps I should highlight in goldleaf, since extravagant excess is so much in the spirit of the era. The theatre at Český Krumlov was built in 1766 and remarkably well preserved. Even now access is strictly limited, and its rare performances aren't open to the public. The only other comparable baroque theatre is Drottingholm in Sweden, which is slightly later. The V&A exhibition will be a unique opportunity to look at 18th century stagecraft and understand why it was the way it was. The baroque needs to be understood on its own terms, not by those of the late 19th century, or you miss the whole point.

Český Krumlov castle has a website where you can even do a 360 degree virtual tour of the theatre and read about its history, sets, machinery etc. Highly recommended ! The site has masses of material but takes a while to navigate, so use odd labels like the one simply marked "interesting".

Please see the other posts on baroque art and music, and the big exhibition at the V&A

http://www.castle.ckrumlov.cz/docs/en/zamek_5nadvori_bd.xml

Jauchzet, it's Bach, in Macau !

A concert by the Macau Orchestra, from Xmas last year. Watch it for interior scenes of S. Domingo Church - isn't it gorgeous ! Leipzig it may not be, but this is truly unique. Then look at this, also by MacauMusic. It is filmed in the Dom Pedro V theatre featured below on this blog (where Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears played in 1956) When the offstage trumpeter plays, you can see him backlit in the baroque balcony. Almost nobody gets to see that ! Well off the tourist track.

Prom 32 Manchicourt, Messiaen

From Stravinsky to Rachmaninov, from Elliott Carter to Ferneyhough, so many "modern" composers draw inspiration from early music. This year at Aldeburgh there was a veritable feast of Bach and Bach transcriptions, showing how "new" music uses ideas from the very ancient past. Luigi Nono and his fellow students in the early 1950's were told to sing motets in harmony while trying to swim in a choppy ocean. It was a good exercise because they learned how different rhythms could coexist and disintegrate, querying the vary basis of rhythm. Early music is so much the parent of the new that sometimes it seems the 19th century was an aberration, a quirk in the march of music history.

So it was an education to hear Messiaen's Messe de la Pentecôte, interspersed with Manchicourt's Missa Veni Sancte Spiritus written in the mid 1550's. Messiaen played in church nearly every day for 60 years, and indeed Messe de la Pentecôte was played as a whole during Masses at Ste Trinité, but song has always been part of a Mass, so mixing Messiaen with Manchicourt is perfectly natural. Indeed, the multi-part structure of Messiaen's music lends itself to this kind of meaningful enhancement. I specially liked this combination because it balanced the solo organ with the polyphony of the voices. It showed just how original and inventive Messiaen's liturgical writing really was. There's conventional grandeur, but also extreme delicacy, such as the segment with the quiet birdsong. Then the wild "breath of the Spirit" which suddenly sweeps all before it, God himself dispensing with conventional form.