We do like a bit of Renaissance music at the Wig. This lunchtime concert seemed just the ticket when we booked it months ago and still seemed like a coveted ticket come the day.
We thought it was an excellent concert. This size of ensemble and style of music works perfectly, to our ears, in The Wigmore Hall. The Tallis in particular was a memorably wonderful sound.
We attended this very tasty lunchtime concert and pre-concert discussion.
The noon-time discussion was between Patrick Allies, the artistic director of Siglo De Oro and Dr Daniel Trocmé-Latter, the academic whose work on the context and musical transcription of this “Mysterious Motet Book of 1539″initiated the project.
I found the information about the development of part books as printing became widespread in the Renaissance and the distinction between Protestant and Catholic liturgical music at the time of the Reformation fascinating.
Less convincing, to me, was the “mystery” aspect of the project, the conceit of which is, if I might paraphrase, “why might a publisher such as Peter Schöffer the Younger choose to publish a music book of Latin liturgical songs from Milan…in Strasbourg, which was, by 1539, a strongly Protestant town?”
Much like his illustrious Burgundian ancestors, Ferdinand seems to have been interested in tennis as well as music. Ferdinand was also evidently impressed by Milanese cultural style in several ways, not just liturgical music. He was also, reputationally, a conciliator between Protestants and the Catholics in his lands.
Still, if the purpose of promoting this music as “a mysterious publication” is as conduit for wonderful concerts and premier recordings of several of the pieces form the motet book…bring it on! It’s a thriller.
The music in the concert was lovely. Janie and I both loved it. They mixed and matched between motets from that 1539 book and some more familiar, later pieces, e.g. by Byrd and Tallis, by way of contrast and comparison, which worked well musically.
Siglo de Oro don’t put much in the public domain, but the sample below is downloadable from the website plugging the album, so you might as well hear Johannes Lupi: Apparens Christus below before you click through and buy the almum.
This was our first concert experience of live music since before the start of the Covid pandemic.
There’s nothing like a bit of “Lamentations of Jeremiah” and “Stabat Mater” to cheer us up in a time of pandemic and war.
Actually Janie and I are big fans of The Cardinall’s Musick. Also, we thought that one hour concerts would be a good way of getting back on the bike in terms of concert going – this is the first of a few we are going to see this spring season.
Mostly familiar stuff, such as Byrd, Victoria, Tallis and Palestrina, plus some rarer material such as the Lamentations of Jeremiah by Gerónimo Gonzales – a composer so obscure that even Andrew Carwood couldn’t find him in the Grove or on Wikipedia.
But that just means that Andrew didn’t look hard enough – there are about 100 listings for Gerónimo Gonzales on Facebook. Our 17th century composer geezer is bound to be one of those – no?
The concert was broadcast on Radio 3 as a lunchtime concert and also was streamed, so you can watch it all on Vimeo if you wish – embedded below.
https://vimeo.com/696602289
You can even, if you look very closely indeed, grab a glimpse of Ged & Daisy at the very front on the right hand side – my bald patch glistening next to Daisy’s mop of reddish hair.
We enjoyed a snack lunch at Euphorium in St Christopher’s Place, then went back to the flat for a while before venturing into Piccadilly/St James’s to Boodle’s.
Last year I gave an on-line talk for that club, under the auspices of Oliver Wise…
…who told me at that time that he would like to host us for dinner at Boodle’s. As with so many things in this time of Covid, it took quite a while to find a suitable and allowable date.
It was worth the wait – we had a delightful evening with Oliver, Sarah, Julian Dent (another fellow realist and distant cousin to Oliver) and Julian’s wife Kelly. Great grub too.
A fine end to a really lovely day off, with live concert music again, at last!
I’d heard a lot about The Gesualdo Six – they are currently the hottest boy band of the early music vocal consort world – so I have been keen to see them for some time.
This early evening concert at St John’s Smith Square slot didn’t suit Janie on a Wednesday, so I made one of those unusual but no longer rare concert bookings just for me.
What a super short concert it was.
SJSS had been turned around for this concert, so the audience faces the organ, not the massive, tired-looking stage – something I know they’d been talking/thinking about, but until now I had not yet experienced it. Janie and I have thought for some time that this configuration would work better for soloists and small ensembles.
It does work better.
I got in early to bagsy a good seat and took a picture. You can see my coat draped across a front row seat.
SJSS Turned Around
Nice touch with the candles.
The hall soon filled up – several hundred people I would estimate – the largest audience I have seen at SJSS for a while. The idea of doing an early evening concert of this kind ahead of the main event certainly worked for this evening – perhaps also linked to the fact that this concert was part of the Holy Week Festival.
The people sitting to the left of me clearly knew one of the singers, Guy James, who chatted with them briefly before the gig. The younger woman in that party asked him to throw in a pop song or two – but he shyly demurred, saying that he’d love to but it would probably get him into trouble with the others. Not very rock’n’roll.
I did and do have an arithmetical problem with this group. When I looked at the picture on their website – click here –and/ or the above SJSS web page and/or indeed the programme for the evening, I kept counting seven people in The Gesualdo Six.
A knowledgeable-sounding fellow sat next to me about five minutes before the start of the Gesualdo Six concert – he said that he had seen some of the performers before (e.g. Joseph Wicks recently) but never the entire ensemble together and was very excited to be getting to see them.
I mentioned my cardinal number problem – i.e. the matter of seven people comprising The Gesualdo Six, hoping for some insight from this knowledgeable fellow.
“I know, yes…tough isn’t it,” was that gentleman’s unhelpful reply.
But from now it’s all good news.
There were only six people in The Gesualdo Six on the night – which put me at my ease again.
The music was absolutely lovely.
Indeed, the opening number, Tallis’s Te Lucis Ante Terminum, was worth the price of admission alone (as sports commentators would tend to put it).
I don’t normally go for modern choral music mixed in with early music, but I was much taken by the several lullabies by Veljo Tormis, which contrasted nicely with the Byrd lullaby.
I also enjoyed Owain Park’s own piece, Phos Hilaron. I cannot honestly claim to have got much out of Joanna Marsh’s pieces, though.
But basically I loved the gig – they are a wonderful ensemble – so when Owain Park announced that we could buy pre-release copies (due out Easter Weekend) of the group’s debut album on exit, I was up there with my £12 like a shot.
You can order/buy the album from all the usual outlets or direct from the band’s site by clicking below:
Below is a video from an unspecified place of The Gesualdo Six singing some Tallis – a piece from the album but not from the gig.
Likewise, the following piece of Thomas Tomkins (seen below in Ely Cathedral) is on the album but wasn’t on show at the gig:
They only sang one piece of Gesualdo on the night – not the following one, but I can’t let you sample The Gesualdo Six without Gesualdo himself:
Finally, below is a little documentary piece about the group from SJSS itself two years ago. They look unfeasibly young in the vid – they still look young but not THAT young. Two years is a long time for a boy band. Another couple of years on the road and they might look like The Rolling Stones by 2020.
All of this rather puts my own attempt at some seasonal, medieval-style performance into the shade:
Janie and I really like this sort of 16th century music and here was a rare chance to listen to Cristóbal de Morales’s requiem, along with a swathe of English stuff from a similar period.
Morales was from Seville although his sound is heavily influenced by his years in Rome too.
Jolly it wasn’t, but then what do you expect when you choose to hear requiem masses, Jeremiah’s lamentations and that sort of thing?
But very beautiful it was.
I especially enjoyed the Morales, which was the main reason I booked the concert. We hear quite a lot of the 16th century English stuff, whereas the Morales felt like a rare treat.
This type of music (mostly 10 voices in five parts) works so well in the Wigmore Hall and The Cardinall’s Musick are really superb at delivering this stuff. Andrew Carwood always explains the context in detail, but not painful detail.
The audience lapped it all up and managed to coax the team back onto the pitch for an encore – I think it was the first two verses from Tallis’s Psalm 1 setting.
It was a Tuesday evening and Janie had early patients etc. the next day, so we didn’t dine together – I think Janie got home just before the heavens opened. Good job I was in the flat when the rains came – it was torrential and I had left windows open. There’d have been Jeremiah-style lamentations from me if my computer and/or baroq-ulele had got wet.
I don’t use that word in the youthful, throw-away sense that I have been known to lampoon elsewhere – click here for an example.
I mean that some of the items I saw this evening really did inspire awe. That rare, tingling feeling at the back of my neck when seeing an especially stunning drama unfolding in an unexpected way, or hearing a wonderful piece of music, or seeing a rare, thought-provoking and/or beautiful artefact.
This was a very interesting Gresham Society outing, albeit so close to Gresham home turf that the word “outing” seems barely appropriate. The Guildhall is just off Gresham Street and around the corner from the old Gresham College; perhaps an “innings” rather than an outing for the Gresham Society.
I hadn’t realised the diversity of subject matter contained in the collection. I knew to expect music books and I knew that the Guildhall Collection generally had a massive collection of books about London; my cousin Sidney would have been in his element for those. But also many books on food in the Gresham Collection and fascinating books about travel, inventions and mechanical devices.
After the illustrated talk, Peter then showed us around the many artefacts he had lovingly laid out around the library for us to glance at and (in the case of more robust/less rare items) examine.
Among the most interesting to me, a rare manuscript of Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis, a favourite piece of mine. The rarity of this manuscript is two-fold. Firstly, it is documented as a “grandchild” of an original autograph – those are extremely rare for words of such antiquity and especially so for this work. Secondly, it contains a forty-first part for this forty-part piece.
One very beautiful travel book, Victorian era I should imagine, included a description and illustration of musicians in Aleppo. My slightly cack-handed smart phone image below does not do justice to the picture.
But the highlight of the artefacts was the Purcell Autograph from the Gresham Music Collection. That was the item that really made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
In order to ensure we were in the right mood for the Purcell Autograph, Peter Ross put on some suitable Purcell Music. I didn’t realise until later that he really was playing the music from the autograph we were observing; the contents of the autograph were recorded some years ago and the recording is still available as a CD or download. I have downloaded the album and am listening to it with great pleasure as I write. It can be obtained through Amazon – click here...and other places too no doubt.
Libations and nibbles were available in the lecture room, at a safe distance from the precious books. The Gresham Society people are always delightful company. I believe that the merriment continued afterwards in a nearby watering hole; I needed to retreat quite early having irritatingly accepted an early morning speaking engagement in Southampton the next day. Still, this evening at the Guildhall Library will live long and happily in my memory.
What a wonderful way to end the working week; a concert of beautiful early music. We’ve seen Stile Antico before at the Wigmore Hall; they are a truly inspirational vocal ensemble.
We ran into Eric Rhode and his wife, Maria at this concert, as often we do. He is no doubt at the Wigmore Hall even as I write, as I know there is early music on there right now, a couple of weeks’ after the Stile Antico event.
Revisiting this article in May 2020 during Covid-19 lockdown, I am glad to see that, in 2015, Stile Antico showed off their skills by singing Renaissance pieces that were designed for 12 voices. Lockdown has strangely enabled the group to multiply virtually, producing the following delicious 40 part performance of Tallis’s Spem In Alium:
But in truth, the concert we heard that might would have looked and sounded more like the following recording from 2013 of William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus at The Wig itself:
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”.
It’s not easy to get Janie up into town on a Wednesday evening. But this opportunity to hear a harpsichord recital by Trevor Pinnock was too good to miss.
And boy was it good.
A fascinating programme for the evening, starting in the 16th century and working deep into the 18th.
For those who don’t click, it is music by Antonio de Cabezón, William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, John Bull, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Domenico Scarlatti and Antonio Soler.
Many and varied.
Below is a YouTube sound piece of the Antonio de Cabezón we heard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK6tKcMKyB4
Below is an interview with Pinnock about his “Journey” project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UF9ug9RlWY
He talks so sensibly and knowledgeably in that interview, as indeed he did when explaining the recital to us on the night.
Anyway, that concert in October 2013 was a delicious as well as interesting listen and such an honour to see Trevor Pinnock perform those works up close.
We’d seen them perform before and had even previously seen one of their concerts at which Andrew Carwood explained the sectarian political backdrop to the music in those Tudor times…
…it must have been like the politics of Brexit but with capital punishment in place of the earhole bashing.
No wonder these Tudor composers took solus in lamentations and such Jeremiad material.
As usual with such concerts, it was fascinating to hear the contrast between the lesser and the better known composers; Tallis and especially Byrd being the better known and better represented composers on the night. The better known fellows deserve their status in my view; certainly for this type of music.
