Review of ApotropaïK- Bella Donna: Cambridge Early Music
ApotropaïK, acclaimed French vocal and instrumental ensemble, and winner of the ‘Cambridge Festival Prize’ at ‘York Early Music International Young Artists Competition’ (2022), comprises four members: Clémence Niclas (recorder and voice), Louise Bouedo-Mallet (bowed fiddle), Marie-Domitille Murez (gothic harp) and Clément Stagnol (medieval lute).
The group, which takes its name from a Greek word for something which wards off evil, in this case the power of ‘music’ to do so, specialises in instrumental music and vocal monodies and polyphonies from the 12th to the 15th Centuries.
The evening’s enthralling presentation in St Catharine’s Chapel by four very gifted individuals, took as its theme women in the Middle Ages, informing us of the range of ways in which they were viewed, as objects of worship in both a sacred and secular sense, but sometimes also as dangerously seductive and destructive figures. Hence the concert’s title, acknowledging that the term ‘Bella Donna’ is also applied to the toxic plant more popularly known as ‘Deadly Nightshade’.
Only five works of the female troubadour Beatriz Contessa de Dia (c.1175) survive, and one of these, ‘A chantar m’er de so qu’eu no volria’, is the only known canso to survive together with its music. With this example of a medieval secular piece, and which is sung in the Occitan language, ApotropaïK chose to begin the evening’s performance The persona sends the song as a messenger to a would-be lover who remains intractably unresponsive.
Wonderful lead singer and recorder player Clémence Nicals, sang the lyric to an accompanying drone on the bowed fiddle, and as she became more and more impassioned, the lute and harp joined in as accompaniment.
The tradition of ‘courtly love’, as known, begins with suchlike ‘complaints’, and is to be found represented by figures such as Emelye in Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale’, blissfully unaware of the self-destructive devotion to her as shown by both would-be suitors Palamon and Arcite, as well as in Renaissance sonnet sequences such as Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Astrophil and Stella’ where ‘she’ is the ‘star’ and he, without hope, is the ‘lover of the star’.
The text of an instrumental that followed (‘Can l’erba fresch’) was another ‘complaint’ (reminiscent of Andrew Marvell’s much later poem ‘To his Coy Mistress’) that he and his would-be mistress are not getting much loving done. Time is passing and they’re losing the best of it.
’Honte, paour, doubtance de meffaire’, a ballade by Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) sets out the ideal behaviour of the courtly lady, exhorting moderation and modest deportment, but remarking that even the most refined of young people can be induced by love to exceed sense and caution.
As Shakespeare would later write in Hamlet, ‘youth to itself rebels’ and Marvell, too, admitting that the grave’s ‘a fine [confined] and private [deprived] place’ suggests that his mistress would be better off yielding her own private place to him.
Closely connected with the notion of courtly and ideal love was worship of the Virgin Mary or Mariolatry. Although often regarded as idolatrous, this devotion produced such beautiful works as the instrumental version, chosen by the ensemble, of ‘Ave Maris Stella’ (‘Hail, star of the Sea’), a medieval Marian hymn sung at vespers on feasts of the Blessed Virgin. Juxtaposed with this was ‘Santa Maria amar Cantiga de Santa Maria No. 7’, which identifies a much more worldly situation in which the Virgin Mary intervenes to spirit away the baby of an Abbess who had fallen pregnant and had been denounced to the bishop by her nuns.
Persisting down the centuries are innumerable examples of alluring but destructive women. The ‘femme fatale’ has come to us via classic Romantic works such as Keats’s ‘La Belle dame Sans Merci’ and Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, and the many Victorian novels, and beyond, (Rider Haggard ‘She’, for example), where this kind of female figure is central.
In Guillaume de Machaut’s ballad ‘Phyton, le merveilleuse serpent’ the woman whose mercy is sought by the narrator is fell, cruel and fierce. He lists all that he gets in return for his devotion to someone who takes delight in his sore torment, namely denial, disdain, contempt, obduracy. This ‘Crudel Donna’ is a serpent who outdoes in fierceness that mythic Python whom Phoebus slew with his bow.
Clémence was a tower of strength in her delivery of these (and more) songs. Her outstanding voice was capable of the softest lyricism as well as the passionate utterance demanded by feelings of anger frustration and rejection, somewhat akin to that demanded by the Portuguese Fado. Some of the songs (e.g.‘Hone, paour’ and ‘Phyton’) had lovely intervals which showed off the virtuosic talents of lutenist Clément, violist Louise, and harpist Marie-Domitille. It was a delight to watch Louise transported by the music which she was simultaneously hearing and contributing to.
The performance concluded with a lengthy, sprightly instrumental, ‘Isabella’, which this time foregrounded the extraordinary skills of Clémence on recorder, pointing up in such a musician’s hands the extraordinary versatility of that particular instrument.
This illuminating and engrossing concert left us with so many sounds – sounds which were always beautiful, sometimes plaintive, and always strangely haunting. It was a performance all too brief for Thursday’s capacity audience in St Catharine’s Chapel who clearly didn’t want it to come to an end.
JOHN GILROY
