Recently in Performances

ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude

English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.

Love, always: Chanticleer, Live from London … via San Francisco

This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).

Dreams and delusions from Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall

Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.

Treasures of the English Renaissance: Stile Antico, Live from London

Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.

A wonderful Wigmore Hall debut by Elizabeth Llewellyn

Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.

The Sixteen: Music for Reflection, live from Kings Place

For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.

Iestyn Davies and Elizabeth Kenny explore Dowland's directness and darkness at Hatfield House

'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’

Paradise Lost: Tête-à-Tête 2020

‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’

Joyce DiDonato: Met Stars Live in Concert

There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.

‘Where All Roses Go’: Apollo5, Live from London

‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields 're-connect'

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.

Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton join Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO at St Luke's

The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.

Choral Dances: VOCES8, Live from London

With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.

Royal Opera House Gala Concert

Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.

Fading: The Gesualdo Six at Live from London

"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."

Met Stars Live in Concert: Lise Davidsen at the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo

The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.

Precipice: The Grange Festival

Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.

Monteverdi: The Ache of Love - Live from London

There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”

Music for a While: Rowan Pierce and Christopher Glynn at Ryedale Online

“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”

A Musical Reunion at Garsington Opera

The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.

OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »

Performances

Elizabeth of York [Source: Wikipedia]
11 Dec 2014

Mary, Queen of Heaven, Wigmore Hall

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.

Mary, Queen of Heaven — Sub-plot: Elizabeth of York

A review by Claire Seymour

Above: Elizabeth of York [Source: Wikipedia]

 

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 repeatedly 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.

Fayrfax was one of the most pre-eminent English musicians of the early-sixteenth century, holding many important positions during the kingship of Henry VII and the early reign of Henry VIII. A member of the Chapel Royal, he accompanied Henry VIII to the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520. Subsequently, his talents have perhaps been undervalued: he has been seen as a musical ‘conservative’, emulating the style and methods of Dunstable at a time when Flemish musicians such as Josquin de Près were experimenting with new complex polyphonic techniques.

Fayrfax’s Mass, O quam glorifica, is one of most complex masses of the period, and the Gloria opened the evening’s performance. The mass was probably written as part of Fayrfax’s doctorate submission to the University of Cambridge c.1502, and was thus designed to show off the Fayrfax’s technical skill and musical invention — as well as his mastery of the perceived intellectual foundations of the art of composition, such as the mathematical patterns which underpin the formal structure and metrical arrangements.

The ten singers of The Cardinall’s Musick gave a polished and purposeful account, Fayrfax’s fluent note-against-note counterpoint and conjunct melodies, with only occasional dissonance, resulting in a mellifluous mass of sound. Great dignity was evoked, and interest generated, by the perpetual re-voicings and re-positionings of Fayrfax’s expansive chords of full harmony. Moreover, just as the textural patterns were handled very expressively, so the metrical complications — the mixed meters, irregular phrase lengths and complex syncopations — were pointedly and judiciously articulated.

Interestingly, The Cardinall’s Musick presented not a perfectly blended sound but one in which individual voices retained their distinct timbre and character; such individualism is perhaps at odds with the contemporary ‘spirit’ of the age, but it is an approach which — complemented by Carwood’s subtle changes of tempo and slight rubatos — nevertheless helped to highlight and shape the points of imitation, and it brought animation and colour to the textures.

Fayrfax’s beautiful melodic writing was noteworthy in the simple motet Ave lumen gratiae (Hail light of grace), a litany of praise in which each line begins with the uplifting address, ‘Ave’. But, it was the five-part motet, Eterne laudis lilium, which brought the full vocal voices together for the concluding work of the programme, which most was most compelling and also most strange. After a hymn of praise to the Blessed Virgin, there follows a genealogy of the Holy Family, tracing the female lineage from Mary to St. Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. The two sections announcing the list of names, pairing the tenor first with the treble and then with the bass, were excitedly swept aside by imitative entries for all five voices when ‘Elizabeth’ was announced. Records show that on 28 March 1502, Fayrfax received twenty shillings from Elizabeth of York, the consort of Henry VII and mother of Henry VIII, for setting ‘an anthem of oure Lady and St Elizabeth’. Clearly this motet was intended as a tribute to Queen Elizabeth of York who was mortally ill at the of the work’s composition — indeed, the first letter of each line forms an acrostic reading ELISABETH REGINA ANGLIE — and here the repetitions of the Queen’s name were finely and expressively sung.

The Cardinall’s Music also performed compositions by Fayrfax’s contemporaries and friends. William Cornysh’s short votive anthem, Ave Maria, mater Dei, is one of the composer’s eight contributions to the Eton Choirbook, and characteristically addresses Mary as the intermediary through whom one may find eternal rest: ‘mother of God, Lady, queen of heaven, empress of hell’. The singers made much of the harmonic nuances and complex rhythms, and especially relished the shifting vocal textures. After the opening declamatory invocation for four voices, trio and a duet sections followed, making the return to full voices for the prayer ‘miserere mei’ which ends first part most striking; the rich textures of the final Amen were similarly dramatic.

Walter Lambe’s four-voice Stella caeli (Star of heaven) was an interesting inclusion. It contrasts with the other Marian texts in that rather than seeking spiritual salvation it implores the Virgin for protection against a more mundane but deadly reality: plague. Mary, addressed as a celestial power, is entreated to ‘be gracious and restrain the heavens, whose attacks bring our people low with fierce and deadly wounds’.

There were some unfamiliar names too. John Plummer’s Tota pulcra es (You are altogether beautiful), is a setting of text from the Songs of Songs and looks ahead to the reign of Edward VI during which Plummer flourished. Here we enjoyed some seductively smooth, conjunct melismas, the continual shifts between two- and three-voice textures adding further appeal. George Banaster was a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal during the 1470s. His antiphon ‘O Maria et Elizabeth’ continued the unification of religious and political sentiment, moving from traditional supplication to a prayer for the monarch and for the good fortune of the country.

Secular works were interspersed between the spiritual compositions. Fayrfax was represented by two gentle love songs, ‘Most clere of colour’ and ‘To complayne me’, while the less well-known Edward Turges’s ‘Enforce Yourself as God’s Own Knight’ for soprano, alto and bass, allowed the singers to demonstrate their vocal agility and control in the long, florid melismas which conclude the syllabic, homophonic verses.

It was intriguing to listen to this music in a present-day concert hall, a situation far removed from the devotional contexts in which it was performed 600 years ago. As the sound swelled, a ‘gravity’ was conveyed by the grand choral effect, suggesting a spiritual certainty which is less frequently encountered in the modern age.

Claire Seymour


Performers and programme:

The Cardinall’s Musick: Andrew Carwood, director; Julie Cooper, Cecilia Osmond (soprano); David Gould, David Martin (alto); Steven Harrold, Nicholas Todd (tenor); Robert Evans, Robert Rice (baritone); James Birchall, Simon Whitely (bass).

Robert Fayrfax: Gloria from Missa O quam glorifica, Most clere of colour, O Maria Deo grata, Ave lumen gratiae, To complayne me, Eterne laudis lilium. Walter Lamne: Stella caeli. William Cornysh: Ave Maria mater Dei, Gaude virgo mater Christi. Gilbert Banaster: O Maria et Elizabeth. John Plummer: Tota pulcra es. Edward Turges: Enforce yourself as God’s own knight.

Wigmore Hall, London, Monday, 8th December 2014.

Send to a friend

Send a link to this article to a friend with an optional message.

Friend's Email Address: (required)

Your Email Address: (required)

Message (optional):