Review of Continuum: Renaissance Music for Lent from the Iberian Peninsula
‘Continuum’ choir under the direction of Harry Guthrie (one-time President of the Trinity College Music Society) and comprising typically 18 singers is a recently established young ensemble which specialises in offering original interpretations of choral music from the Renaissance to the present. Including performance of music from the established repertoire as well as under-performed pieces, the Choir also promotes new commissions.
In Clare College Chapel on Saturday evening, appropriately the eve of Passion Sunday, ‘Continuum’ presented a selection of Spanish and Portuguese Renaissance music for the season of Lent. This encompassed celebrated traditional polyphonic music, lesser-known Spanish motets and songs, and a newly commissioned work, ‘Cruz: A triptych-motet to the Holy Cross’ by Cambridge-based composer Carlos Rodríguez Otero, formerly a choral scholar at Queens’ College Cambridge.
The programme, part of Clare’s series ‘Intimate Engagements 2023-2024’, and sponsored by Professor Eric Nye of Clare College, focused attention on Spanish music of relevance to the weeks leading up to Passiontide and Easter, the Church’s principal Feast.
The various pieces from the wide range of composers chosen for performance reflected on the Incarnation, Christ’s identification with his people, and an embracing of his sufferings as the means to unification with Him.
Intense emotion, wonderfully achieved by ‘Continuum’ throughout their programme, was evident very early on in the concert in their performance of Antonio Lobo’s ‘Versa est Luctum’ (Job. 30) written for the funeral of Philip II in 1598 communicating a people’s despair at the loss of their beloved king who had considered himself the chief defender of Catholic Europe against the forces of the Protestant Reformation. The famous doomed Armada he had sent to England ten years previous to his death had been intended to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I and re-establish the country’s Catholicism.
And the Counter Reformation perhaps explains an emphasis by ‘Continuum’ on the Blessed Virgin Mary in its evening’s choice of pieces. What it regarded as the idolatrous worship of Mary (Mariolatry) was a focus of Protestantism’s hostility to Catholicism.
In Francisco Guerrero’s ‘Ave Virgo Sanctissima’ (‘Hail, most Holy Virgin’) veneration for Mary reaches its height, not only in the number of devotional motets Guerrero composed in honour of the BVM, but also in the sheer emotional depth of his feelings for her as realized in the beauty of his music.
This kind of emotion was ignited and sustained vigorously in often overwhelmingly powerful deliveries as ‘Continuum’ did justice to texts where language from the heart, both for Christ and his Mother, is expressed in terms bordering the erotic in, for example, Guerrero’s ‘Si tus penas no pruevo’ (cp. John Donne: ‘Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I / Except you enthral mee, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me’) and King Alonso’s ‘Rosa das Rosas’ (‘This lady, whom I acknowledge as my master/And whose troubadour I’d gladly be,/If I could in any way possess her love,/I’d give up all my other lovers’).
Carlo Otero’s motet ‘Cruz’ which brought the concert to its conclusion set together three contrasting Spanish texts by poet Juan Boscán (1490-1548), poet, playwright and novelist Antonio Gala (1930-2023) and Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), Carmelite nun, poet and mystic. The compositional style, we were told, honours the Renaissance polyphonic tradition and maintains a ‘contemporary spin’.
Boscán’s poem ‘The Nightingale who loses her young’ (reflecting ‘Maria Dolorosa’, Mary at the foot of the Cross) was full of plaintive dissonance, and Teresa’s ‘Greeting to the Cross’ was once more on the theme of suffering, and beautifully delivered.
But it was ‘Continuum’s’ rendering of the verse by the recently deceased poet Gala which revealed fully this young group’s totally outstanding vocal power and range. ‘Cruz’ in itself is a spellbinding composition, of which Clare’s rapt audience was aware, and in ‘Continuum’ had found its perfect exponents.
Also bringing the motet’s three texts together, as concert notes explained, was a shared use of the plainsong melody of ‘Vexilla Regis’ (‘The royal banner goes forward’), a celebrated poem by St Venantius Fortunatus, some verses of which had commenced the concert, were variously deployed throughout it, and also brought it to its conclusion. These verses were used ‘as a foundation for traversing the rich textual and compositional connections found in Iberian music.’
A sense therefore of journeying was implicit in the concert. ‘Continuum’ had presented a ‘traversing’ of music between the Renaissance and contemporary history, as well as the idea of ‘procession’.
A relic of the True Cross had been ‘processed’ by the Emperor Justin II from the East at the request of St Radegund, a 6th Century Frankish queen, and brought to her abbey at Poitiers of which she was foundress. Vexilla Regis is a celebration of its journey and is associated with various liturgical processions from Passion Sunday to Easter Day. There is a veneration of the Cross on Good Friday, and a procession of the Blessed Sacrament from its repository to the High Altar on that day too.
So it was appropriate that ‘Continuum’ should have left the platform to the strains of ‘Vexilla Regis’ once more, and in procession as they sang it.
This was the premiere of a motet which in future deserves to be incorporated as one among equals in the liturgies regularly performed throughout Lent.
There was a commitment and shaping intelligence at work behind this whole delightful programme. One looks forward to similar performances from the talented ‘Continuum’ choir as they introduce more of the enlightening historic musical traditions to which we are all the fortunate heirs.
JOHN GILROY
