Whatever we know about the 12th-century religious polymath Hildegard of Bingen is new knowledge, because she all but vanished from the record until the 1970s when her work was rediscovered, turning her into a cult figure. And there was plenty to discover. Essentially a Benedictine nun, she was also a mystic given to visions, theologian, poet, musician… her recent list of achievements has come to include feminist icon as well as Doctor of the Church (Pope Benedict being one of her biggest fans).
But nine centuries of relative neg-lect still leave a void of information about how she expected her music to be performed. Back in 1982 a land-mark recording by Emma Kirkby established a possible way of doing it that caught the public imagination and still does. But scholarship moves on, ideas change, and we’ve reached something like an open season on Hildegard performance where anything goes: as it did last month in a border-line mind-altering event that ran at Oxford’s University Church under the auspices of the Oxford Song Festival.
Three female singers who collect-ively form the consort Voice worked their way through an unbroken sequ- ence of Hildegard’s ecstatic, soaring chants in a “realisation” that some-times exploded into overdrive. It was accompanied by movement, as the singers processed around the church. And above all, it was accompanied by digital projections supervised by someone who I’m told works normally with rock bands.
Blinding light (and there was plenty in this show) is a persistent element in Hildegard’s verse, giving rise to theories that her visions were in truth a kind of migraine. It’s entirely plausible – in which case there was authenticity about the way the ever-spinning visuals in the show gave me a headache. But the music was impressive if relentless. And given current perceptions of Hildegard as radically experimental, pushing liturgical chant into uncharted territories, she may well have approved. If nothing else it drew a packed, surprisingly young audience. Clearly the nun rocks.
One of the (many) things music can do is give new life to silenced voices – as happened last month when Songs of Nadia Anjuman, a new orchestral song cycle by Richard Blackford, had its London premiere at the Guildhall School’s Milton Court.
Anjuman was an Afghan poet who fought the presiding Taliban regime for women’s rights and the opportunity to publish verse. As a result, she was beaten to death by her husband – whose punishment of a month’s imprisonment was both a travesty of justice and an insult to Anjuman’s memory. Fortunately some of her verse survives and formed the basis for this piece, sung by the soprano Elizabeth Watts with the Britten Sinfonia.
Fuelling one of the most memorable premieres I’ve heard all year, Ajuman’s words had potency. The music gave them radiance, nobility and profile. And with spellbinding performances by Watts and the Sinfonia, I came away convinced that we’d experienced a modern classic. Blackford is best-known these days for writing large-scale choral music; he is a seriously good composer. And the technical sophistication of these Songs was as impressive as their beauty.
An abiding fantasy of mine is to have witnessed one of those unspeakably sophisticated soirées that took place in Paris in the early 1900s, making small-talk with the likes of Marcel Proust between the movements of some sonic jewel by Fauré or Reynaldo Hahn. If only.
The Two Moors Festival last month offered a taste of how it might have been – translated to a country-house on Exmoor whose grand drawing-room played host to an attempted recreation of French salon life. Music by Berlioz, Cesar Franck and others filtered through the elegant interiors of Castle Hill House, courtesy of violinist Mathilde Mildwisky, pianist Christopher Glyn and soprano Rachel Nicholls. An actor, Alan Corduner, declaimed appropriately edited-down chunks of A la recherche du temps perdu. And completing the experience was tea and cake, with Madeleines to reverently dunk. All good clean fun.
But beyond fun was the contribution of the Sitkovetsky Trio who, joined by violist Edgar Francis, gave a performance of Faure’s 1st Piano Quartet that swept over the Madeleines like a tsunami and left us all in stunned amazement. If you’ve never heard the Sitkovetskys, they are physically alive musicians of intense power. And to hear them in the intimacy of a drawing-room was almost too much – though I’m glad I did, and glad too that I heard them again the following night, playing Tchaikovsky’s lacerating A Minor Piano Trio in another Two Moors concert at Dulverton Church. Like John Donne begging for a battering by God, I happily surrendered to the crushing mastery of what they did. Concerts don’t often come this good; but when they do, it truly has the measure of celestial assault.
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