Review of The Gesualdo Six: 10th Anniversary Concert
Season 23-24 is the 30th anniversary of Cambridge Early Music, and this just happens to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the vocal ensemble’s formation who were being presented by CEM on Tuesday evening.
The Gesualdo Six, now justifiably renowned worldwide, came together as a combination of individual talents, and several members of the celebrated group have close connections with Cambridge and its locality.
Trinity College in particular has a central place in the history of the ‘Six’ in whose chapel on the 5th March 2014 (10 years ago to the day) they had made their debut, including in their programme some of the Tenebrae Responses by the composer, Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613), from whom they take their name.
Owain Park, Director of the Gesualdo Six, leads a distinguished group of singers who, often from early-life experience as choristers, have gone on to be organ scholars, organists and music academics with associated interests therein, delivering music from the Middle Ages to modern times, with their identifiable pedigree stamped upon everything they select from within their extensive repertoire.
The ensemble entered from the rear of the chapel and slowly progressed towards the front. As a group they have a very effective way of variously disposing themselves according to the music they are performing, as when a few years ago, again in Cambridge, they assembled individually in the ante- chapels and side chapels of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, perfectly reflecting the polyphony of the music they were presenting.
Thomas Tomkins (1596-1646) a pupil of Byrd, and organist of Worcester Cathedral and the Chapel Royal, as a composer of church music covered in his lifetime the first half century of the Stuart period.
Tomkins’s arrangement of ‘When David heard’ (the lament for his dead son, Absalom) gave us a splendid musical experience of what the poet Wordsworth wrote when defending tautology as one of the highest beauties of poetry. Namely that when words are insufficient to convey the strongest emotions, simple repetition, one of the characteristics of biblical language in particular, serves in its stead to convey the deepest of feelings (‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom . .. Absalom, my son, my son!’)
Luca Marenzio (1554-1599), a Roman composer and, like Palestrina, a madrigalist, had much influence on the craze for this polyphonic vocal genre, especially in England in the last decade or so of the C16th. The Gesualdo Six included in their evening’s programme not only work in that genre by these two composers, but also various evocative contemporary settings of earlier music, such as the avant garde Austro-Hungarian composer, György Ligeti’s (d.2006) ‘Nonsense Madrigals’ (impeccably performed), and a beautiful setting by Sarah Rimkus of Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘A Birthday’ (‘My heart is like a singing bird’), blending Renaissance polyphony with contemporary choral music and written specifically for The Gesualdo Six in 2016.
An outstanding performance was given of Owain Park’s own setting of ‘Phos hilaron’ (‘Hail Gladdening Light’), an ancient 3rd Century Christian hymn or chant which occurs subsequently in many different Christian rites pertaining to compline, the last office of each day, and marking the transfer from sunlight to darkness.
Tenebrae, Latin for ‘darkness’, is the term for the Church’s solemn liturgy on the 3 days preceding Easter. The gradual extinguishing of candles reflects the commencement of Christ’s passion and death, and commemorates the Last Supper (Maundy Thursday) on the eve of Good Friday.
The dark world that Gesualdo inhabited, and reflected in his kind of liminal proto-modernist music, included his murdering of both his first wife and her lover. His compositions struck many of his contemporaries as either curious at best or the production of a lunatic. Perhaps they are reminiscent in some ways of the extravagances of the later arch-Romantic, Scriabin, also from a similar aristocratic background (Gesualdo was a prince), and who made messianic claims for the disturbing power of his own work.
The ensemble’s performance of the Tenebrae responses by the composer whose name they share was a masterpiece in the delivery of these complex compositions, and the Gesualdo Six of course included two wonderful pieces by Byrd and Tallis, the Vigilate and Loquebantur respectively.
There was a humorous diversion when Owain Park declared to the audience that the Tallis piece was written for seven parts. He wondered whether anyone in the audience knew the bass part, and sure enough the volunteer ‘plant’ who stepped up to requirements turned out to be a former member of the group itself.
Yet, apart from such moments and anecdotal humour from the charismatic Owain Park, there was something that encouraged arresting contemplation in Tuesday evening’s immaculate and significant performance by the ensemble – the venerable chapel, the Lenten mood, anniversaries and the passing of time, David’s lament, the transition from sun to evening, and the dark side of man’s fallen nature, all concluding with Josef Rheinberger’s beautiful motet Abendlied (evening song).
The selection of repertoire, and there was much more than I mention here, contributed to an event that was, yes, celebratory, but one invoking, too, a reflectiveness at the mystery of everything and which was impossible to ignore.
At the entrance to the chapel was Roubilliac’s statue of former student and Fellow of Trinity, Sir Isaac Newton.
And appropriately in keeping with the programme’s intimations, here was a figure whose humility led him to think of his amazing achievements amounting to no more than those of a man, he once said, picking up shells on the shore of the great ocean of truth.
JOHN GILROY
