Wigmore Hall
Andrea Gabrieli – Vieni, vieni Himeneo
Sciarrino – Tre madrigalMonteverdi – 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
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!
