I FAGIOLINI

Alison Hill Eleanor Minney mezzo-soprano Robert Hollingworth /director Nicholas Hurndall Smith tenor Charles Gibbs bass

Program

William CORNYSHE Woefully array’d 8 min ANON Hey trolly loly lo 4 min John WILBYE Oft have I vowed 2 min Thomas RAVENSCROFT The three ravens 5 min Henry PURCELL When the cock begins to crow 3 min John ISUM When Celia was learning the spinet 2 min Thomas TOMKINS Too much I once lamented 6 min INTERVAL Henry PURCELL Music for a while 7 min Thomas PHILLIPS Crows in the cornfield 3 min Robert Lucas PEARSALL Take, o take those lips away 2 min Robert Lucas PEARSALL Adieu, adieu, my native shore 2 min Benjamin BRITTEN Eight Medieval Lyrics, Sacred and profane op 91 15 min FLANDERS & SWANN Pillar to post 3 min FLANDERS & SWANN The Sloth 3 min

I Fagiolini Grounded in the classics of Renaissance and 20th-century vocal repertoire, I Fagiolini is renowned for its innovative and often staged productions of this music. I Fagiolini has staged Handel with masks, Purcell with puppets, and in 2004 premiered The Full Monteverdi, a dramatised account of the composer’s Fourth Book of Madrigals (1603) by John La Bouchardière, which has since been turned into a highly successful film shown all over the world. In 2006 I Fagiolini toured its South African collaboration Simunye, and in 2009 created Tallis in Wonderland, a new way of hearing polyphony with live and recorded voices. In 2011, I Fagiolini celebrated its 25th anniversary with The Spell (a commission from Orlando Gough), a semi-staged production of Purcell’s King Arthur with , and the world premiere recording of Striggio’s Mass in 40 Parts on Decca. This recording stayed at the top of the specialist classical chart for nearly four months and won the 2011 Gramophone Early Music Award and a Diapason d’or de l’année. The 2012 season featured a tour of the Striggio Mass, the group’s Royal Albert Hall BBC Proms debut and the release of 1612 Italian Vespers (Gramophone CD of the Month), premiering multi- music by Viadana and a reconstructed ‘lost’ Gabrieli Magnificat. It also saw the launch of yet another unlikely collaboration, How Like an Angel, this time with Australian contemporary circus company, Circa; the show premiered as part of the Perth International Arts Festival and toured the UK in 2012 and 2013 to full houses. I Fagiolini closed the year with a new production for Opera North, including shadow puppetry, of David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion. Recent highlights have included debuts at the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Shakespeare’s Globe) and Carnegie Hall. I Fagiolini’s most recent immersive theatre project, Betrayal: a polyphonic crime drama, premiered at the Barbican in May this year. Again conceived by John La Bouchardière, it presents the unsettling music of Carlo Gesualdo in a series of ‘crime scenes’. Forthcoming projects include Carnevale Veneziano (Monteverdi to Monty Python), the release of Draw On Sweet Night (a film and CD about John Wilbye), BBC broadcasts, two Wigmore Hall concerts, a semi-staged production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in Venice, a new Bach collaboration with Circa and, for Monteverdi’s anniversary in 2017, Monteverdi on the Move. I Fagiolini’s next recording project for Decca, Amuse-bouche, includes the world premiere of Jean Francaix’s Ode à la Gastronomie and an arrangement for piano and voices by Roderick Williams of the slow movement from Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. The name I Fagiolini continues to be misspelt and mispronounced wherever it goes, from Africa to Australia, In 2005 the group was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Ensemble Prize. It has recorded 20 CDs and four DVDs and is delighted to be Ensemble-in-Residence at the University of York.

Robert Hollingworth Robert Hollingworth specialises in Renaissance and contemporary repertoire (notably Monteverdi) and in creating ground-breaking projects which present music to audiences in innovative ways. He founded I Fagiolini in 1986; with them he has presented their signature projects including Simunye, The Full Monteverdi, Tallis in Wonderland, How Like an Angel and Betrayal.

He has also directed Accentus (France), the North German Radio Choir, Nederlands Kamerkoor, Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir, Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra (Judas Maccabaeus), The English Concert (Purcell) and the Academy of Ancient Music (Bach).

Robert Hollingworth writes and presents for BBC Radio 3 (CD Review, The Early Music Show, The Choir and Discovering Music). In 2010 he delivered the Lufthansa Lecture, entitled ‘Monteverdi the Modern Man’, and spoke at the European Early Music Network (REMA) conference. He has worked on a number of films including Quills. In 2011, his world premiere recording of Striggio’s (until recently) lost Mass in 40 Parts was released on Decca with an all-star UK line-up, remaining at the top of the specialist classical chart for nearly four months and winning the 2011 Gramophone Early Music Award and a Diapason d’or de l’année. His latest recording, 1612 Italian Vespers, released on Decca Classics in June 2012, was chosen as Gramophone CD of the month. He recently arranged the music for the album Shakespeare: The Sonnets and appeared extensively on BBC TV and radio discussing the disc.

Robert Hollingworth gives masterclasses and residencies throughout Europe. He ran a conducting masterclass and lecture for the American Choral Directors’ Association at their 2012 conference and has just set-up a new Master of Arts program in solo-voice-ensemble music at the University of York, where he is a Reader in Music.

From I Fagiolini’ Musical Director, Robert Hollingworth.

This programme gives us a taste of home after several weeks away. England has an unbroken tradition of singing in parts for pleasure going back centuries and this evening's entertainment revels in that. There is beauty, silliness and wistfulness in almost equal measure. Much of this repertoire was written to give pleasure to those singing it, a much underestimated feature of choral singing. Britten picked up on this in writing his 'Sacred and Profane'. It's graphically descriptive of the amazing texts and fun to sing - if quite demanding! My personal favourite is Thomas Tomkins' 'Too much I once lamented' which is just searingly beautiful and one of the most perfect pieces for voices I know. However I'll be looking forward to the end of the concert and some Flanders & Swann, songs I was brought up on.

Program:

This is a trip through English secular music of the last 500 years. It’s not intended to be inclusive of course but it aims to give a flavour of the pleasure that the English have always had in singing in parts – and particularly singing with just one voice to a part. This has always existed at amateur level although professionally it has come and gone. When I set up my first singing group at the age of 16, it was very much a solo-voice ensemble I wanted to sing in – and not another choir (much as I love the world of ). There is something wonderful about the combination of expressing yourself as an individual yet being part of a team: shaping your line, yet being influenced by all the other parts.

We begin with music from the early 16th century and a composer writing for the court of the young and highly artistic Henry VIII. William Cornyshe was a poet, dramatist, actor and composer - a true Renaissance man. The words he has set by John Skelton are imagined words of Christ on the cross. Yet this is not a sacred motet but part of a large body of 16th European century music on a sacred subject matter yet meant for spiritual contemplation away from church, rather than as part of the liturgy. We follow it with a very different secular song (but from the same time) which recounts a dialogue between a lord of the manor and a pretty country maid. He tries very hard to get his way but she seems very concerned as to what her mother will say about it.

We then jump to a golden age of English music, the short flowering of the English madrigal, 1590- 1620. Farmer’s piece is perhaps what everyone thinks of as the English madrigal while Wilbye and Tomkins’ are more sophisticated, beautifully blending light textures with passing dissonance. Thomas Ravenscroft’s music is from the same time, but he had a particular interest in setting popular/street tunes in the sophisticated garb of music in parts.

English history took a violent turn between this time and the time of Henry Purcell, some 60 years later, with a civil war. Yet when Purcell came to prominence, as well as looking around Europe to contemporary musical fashion, he also looked back to the previous Golden Age and to our great love of singing for pleasure and in parts. ‘When the cock begins to crow’ is a silly trio but great fun while the ‘catches’ are from a body of social songs written to be sung in pubs for the amusement primarily of those singing them. Please do not feel you have to enjoy them yourselves.

Referring to 18th century English music through a single glee (about silly birds) we will draw a discrete veil over this time in England. Italian music was otherwise the rage yet through the period, singing in parts continued - of both Renaissance and contemporary repertoire. In the 19th century, Robert Lucas Pearsall took a great interest in music of the later Renaissance and helped set up a choir called The Bristol Madrigal Society which still continues today under a different name. He himself wrote beautifully crafted partsongs.

The English love affair with vocal music of the 16th century flourished in the early 20th century with the first systematic publication of the sacred and secular music of the great coomposers of the time. This in turn encouraged contemporary composers to treat the a capella choral genre with more respect. Most music written for vocal ensembles since, though, has been conceived for choirs - multi-voiced ensembles. However Britten’s superb ‘Eight Medieval Lyrics’ was written for the Wilbye Consort, a solo-voice group working in the 1970s, and its florid, virtuosic and characterful setting of the medieval texts allows full soloistic expression.

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HOLLINGWORTH

A circus artist suspended between heaven and earth on a narrow ribbon. A cappella vocal music. A cathedral. What do these things have in common?

Everything, to I Fagiolini. That particular match of elements was the vision of Perth Festival director Jonathan Holloway, and it brought the British vocal ensemble to Australia for the first time in 2012. How Like an Angel, which drew I Fagiolini together with Brisbane-based acrobat group Circa, went on to tour UK cathedrals to thundering applause.

‘I think the way we look at music is interesting,’ says group director Robert Hollingworth. ‘As far as the ‘brand’ of British groups is concerned, we’re not a very British group. Perhaps we are closer to British theatre than we are to British Renaissance vocal groups. We’re certainly very British in that we’re good at innovation, and at seeing things in an unusual way.’

Mainland Europe, says Hollingworth, is often bemused by his ensemble’s lack of conformity to their expectations of a stiff-upper-lip formality.

‘I’m interested in music with a social context. I like looking at music that was written for special occasions or to amuse people, because it tells you a lot about how people listened to music and a bit about the social setting.’ Other past projects have included The Full Monteverdi, a dramatised madrigal evening set in a restaurant and based around the idea of six couples breaking up, and Tallis in Wonderland, a performance / sound installation that theatrically deconstructs the concept of polyphony.

For their inaugural Musica Viva tour, Hollingworth plans to dramatise two central works: Giovanni Croce’s Il gioco dell’occa, or ‘The Game of the Goose’, and Clément Janequin’s La Chasse (The Hunt), a viscerally descriptive and somewhat scatalogical account of a deer hunt.

‘The Game of the Goose is a board game which you can still buy in shops in Europe today. We’ve done a simple staging of that, with people playing the board game.

‘In the Janequin, we only meet the animal at the very end. We spend most of the piece looking for him, and finding his droppings, and seeing what state they’re in. Coiled nicely, and steaming, which means he’s in a good state. It’s full of sound effects, dogs barking, horses’ hooves, so it’s quite good fun. It’s a nightmare to memorize – I think we’re the only group ever to have done that.’

For Hollingworth, the drive to present musical works in dramatic stagings comes from the urge to communicate their content more effectively. ‘There’s that Thomas Beecham quote: “The English don’t like music; just the noise it makes.” We try to get people to really involve themselves in the whole piece. I think a huge issue for choral groups, given that we spend a lot of time in the 16th century, is accepting the fact that most of this music was not written to be sat down and listened to. It might have been written for a social context, or for the pleasure of those singing it, which is quite a different thing, or to be performed in church. And polyphony, of its very nature, is difficult to follow. My life in the last years has been trying to work out how to present this music to an audience so that they can get inside it.’

Though perfect intonation is important to I Fagiolini, to the extent that they spend considerable amounts of time on tuning perfect intervals, the passion of the moment in a live performance counts for more, says Hollingworth, than clinical refinement. For him, polyphony is an endless journey. ‘I’m very strong about singers in polyphony finding their own line from beginning to end. This is influenced by things that happen along the way. It’s like light travelling in space – the other singers are the planets which bend the light because of weight and gravity, but there’s still a beginning and an end. There has to be direction.’

Though an avid researcher into the specifics of period performance practice, Hollingworth believes that today’s performers cannot escape the pressures of context and taste. Performance venues are larger, requiring a different vocal technique, and some things we know for certain to be historically accurate, like portamento, or the act of sliding from one note to another, are rejected by today’s performers because they are considered bad taste.

‘We try to kid ourselves that we can do everything as they did before, but we know that part of it is still down to taste. And I think we should just embrace that. On stage you have to make sense of the music for an audience now.’ The second half of the concert features Poulenc’s Sept chansons for eight solo voices: ‘Erotic poetry by Paul Éluard. Sometimes it’s just like a series of blurred black and white images. But it’s so expressive. Monteverdi and Poulenc are the two composers who really draw me out.’

Hollingworth has no difficulty in finding points of reference to Musica Viva’s four core values of quality, diversity, challenge and joy.

‘You can’t excuse a lack of quality. If we’re tremendously entertaining but we sing like dogs, I’m sure we won’t be asked back.

‘You need diversity in programming. When you’re singing with a vocal a cappella group you need variety, and I love to put a South African piece beside a Monteverdi madrigal beside an erotic setting by Poulenc beside a communal dog turd chanson from 1528.

‘I think it’s important to keep challenging the singers – you have to keep them fresh. And I think we’re particularly good at that in I Fagiolini. That’s why I adore Monteverdi, because you never reach 100 percent. But it’s lovely to aim at it.

‘Music-making ought to be about sharing, actually. And that leads to joy.’

Shirley Apthorp © 2014