Tag: Hieronymus Praetorius

The Company Of Heaven, The Cardinall’s Musick, Wigmore Hall, 30 January 2019

A rare Wednesday evening at The Wig with Daisy – she rarely ventures into town Wednesdays, but this concert seemed too interesting to miss.

Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall stub for this concert.

It was being recorded for broadcast 31 January and will be available on-line – click here – shortly after broadcast for some while.

Highly recommended – we always enjoy Cardinall’s Musick concerts. We love their sound and we like the way that Andrew Carwood talks to the audience with a likeable mix of deep scholarship and folksy delivery.

Lots of unfamiliar pieces and even unfamiliar composers in there.

Here is a little vid of this group rehearsing and talking Byrd a few years ago:

https://youtu.be/8bMiYnzkZx4

I’m starting to get a bit fussy in my old age – perhaps because I am learning more about early music.

For example, it seemed to me that the Gregorian Chants interspersed in the Guerrero in the first half, were delivered (at least by the bass and tenor voices) in a staccato style when changing note within a word, quite contrary to the “smoothing” technique Ian Pittaway suggested to me. Patrick Craig, the countertenor, sang with that smoothing technique and it sounded cleaner to my ears. Janie thought the staccato was deliberate and fine.

I also found myself comedically irritated by a spelling mistake in the words for the Agnus Dei in the programme lyrics for that Guerrero mass…spelling that phrase Angus Dei at one point. It made me wonder whether there is a beef of God as well as a lamb of God.

But these are tiny points. The concert was a feast for the ears and just the calming experience I needed after a long day.

I particularly enjoyed the second half of the concert, with shorter pieces by Peter Philips, Philippe Verdelot, Adrian Willaert, Francisco Guerrero, Luca Marenzio, Daniel Torquet (“who he?” I hear you cry – Andrew Carwood is struggling to trace him too) and William Byrd taking the first 40-45 minutes of that second half.

There was a Christmassy encore by Hieronymus Praetorius – we were horrified to learn that, liturgically/technically speaking, we only reach the end of Christmas this weekend.

Still, we loved the concert and thoroughly recommend the broadcast to lovers of this type of music.

Treasures Of The Renaissance – Masterpieces From The Golden Age Of Choral Music, Stile Antico, 11 May 2014

Just gorgeous, this concert was.

Here is a link to the helpful Wigmore Hall calendar note that tells you exactly what we saw.

This was Renaissance choral music at its best.

Barry Millington in the Evening Standard gave the gig this rave review – click here.

Below is a vid of Stile Antico, singing Ego flos campi by Jacobus Clemens non papa, which was the second piece they sang to us and which gives a very good sense of their glorious sound:

Coincidentally, the above recording was made at the Old Royal Naval College which I shall be visiting in a few day’s time (as I write in January 2018), although not for music purposes.

For those who are not blessed with Latin scholarship, “Ego flos campi” means, “I maintain my oral hygiene when I go camping”…

…although those words are occasionally mistranslated by so-called experts as, “I am the flower of the field”.

Anyway, enough of scholarship. Janie and I had enjoyed an early music oriented weekend from start (Joanna MacGregor tinkling the Goldberg on the Friday) to finish – we had no complaints about that.

Play that vid again, go on…gorgeous it is.