CROSSING the CHANNEL with Guest Artistic Director, Scott Metcalfe
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
2019-2020: The Fellowship of Early Music CROSSING the CHANNEL With Guest Artistic Director, Scott Metcalfe MARCH 6 & 7, 2020 2019-2020 Jeanne Lamon Hall, Trinity-St.Paul’s Centre Season Sponsor 2020-2021 A Wellspring of Early Music Subscriptions are now on sale. | Learn more at TorontoConsort.org PROGRAM La contenance angloise: Musical connections across the Channel, c. 1415-1515 I. Echoes across the Channel Deo gracias Anglia anonymous Je suy si povre de liesce (instrumental) ? Guillaume Du Fay (1397-1474) Adieu ma tresbelle maistresse anonymous / text ? by Charles d’Orléans (1394-1465) Speciosa facta es John Dunstaple (c. 1390-1453) Craindre vous vueil, doulce damme de pris Du Fay II. Englishmen at home Anonymous songs from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 191 (copied 1445) O kendly creature Go hert hurt with adversite Thus y complayn my grevous hevynessse III. Englishmen abroad Songs from the Leuven Chansonnier (? Loire Valley, c. 1470) & elsewhere Ave regina celorum Walter Frye (d. before 1475) Plus j’ay le monde regardé Robert Morton (c. 1430-after 1479) Le souvenir de vous me tue Robert Morton (c. 1430-after 1479) Textless ballade (instrumental) anonymous Quand je fus prins au pavillon anonymous / text by Charles d’Orléans IV. Music at the court of Henry VIII Music from Henry VIII’s Manuscript, c. 1518 Adew mes amours et mon desyre William Cornysh (d. 1523) Benedictus (instrumental) Heinrich Isaac (c. 1450-1517) Allez regrets, vuidez de ma presence Hayne van Ghizeghem (b. c. 1445; d. 1476-97) Ales regrets (instrumental) Alexander Agricola (c. 1445-1506) A the syghs that cum fro my hart Cornysh Madame d’amours Anonymous Tonight’s Performers are: Staff & Administration Michelle Knight, Managing Director Adam Thomas Smith, Director of THE TORONTO CONSORT Audience Engagement and Education Nellie Austin, Bookkeeper Katherine Hill – soprano & viol Chris Abbott, Graphic Designer Yara Jakymiw, Season Brochure Graphic Designer Laura Pudwell – mezzo Martin Reis, Derek Haukenfreres, Box Office Peter Smurlick, Database Consultant Cory Knight – tenor Gordon Baker, Stage Manager Cecilia Booth, Front of House, Volunteer Coordinator Paul Jenkins – tenor Gordon Peck, Technical Director Ann Blennerhassett, CD Sales and Event Assistant John Pepper – bass Alison Melville – recorder & flute Esteban La Rotta – lute Board of Directors WITH SPECIAL GUESTS Heather Turnbull, President Scott Metcalfe – fiddle & harp Harry Deeg, Treasurer Frances Campbell, Secretary Jesse Billett – baritone Jason Bernardon Jennifer Bryan Stephanie Butler Anita Nador Andrea Whitehead Gavin Winter Paul Jenkins, ex officio Michelle Knight, ex officio The Toronto Consort Alison Melville, ex officio is a Proud Member of Follow us on Facebook and Instagram! @TorontoConsort 427 Bloor Street West, Toronto ON M5S 1X7 Box Office 416-964-6337 Admin 416-966-1045 | [email protected] bloorstculturecorridor.com TorontoConsort.org ABOUT US Top Row: Paul Jenkins, David Fallis, Laura Pudwell, Esteban La Rotta, John Pepper, Cory Knight Bottom Row: Katherine Hill, Michele DeBoer, Alison Melville, Ben Grossman Photo Credit: Bruce Zinger Since its founding in 1972, The Toronto Consort from dedicated music-history aficionados has become internationally recognized for its to occasional or first-time patrons. excellence in the performance of medieval, Each year, the Consort presents a five- renaissance and early baroque music. Led by production, twelve-concert series in the beautiful a collective of Artistic Associates, the group’s acoustic of Jeanne Lamon Hall at Trinity-St. members are amongst Canada’s leading early Paul’s Centre, located in downtown Toronto’s music specialists, including both singers and Bloor Street Cultural Corridor. The Consort tours instrumentalists on early plucked and bowed regularly, having been to Europe and Great Britain, strings, flutes, keyboards, and percussion. across Canada, and into the United States. The Toronto Consort specializes in rarely The Toronto Consort also offers free audience- heard repertoire from roughly 1100 AD to 1650 AD, engagement activities, such as pre-concert lectures, frequently presented in collaboration with other high school education concerts and learning artists, such as actors, dancers, visual and workshops, and the Early Music Collaboration Lab for multi-media artists, and guest specialists. The Seniors and Youth, and runs development programs collaborative nature of its creative process for Emerging Artists and Board of Directors Training. has led to diverse productions enthusiastically To contact or learn more about The Toronto received by varied modern audiences, Consort, visit TorontoConsort.org. PROGRAM NOTES La contenance angloise: Musical Connections Across the Channel, c. 1415-1515 Tapissier, Carmen, and Cesaris Not long ago sang so well That they astonished all of Paris And all those who visited them; But never did they discant In melody so choice (So I have been told by those who heard them) As do G. Du Fay and Binchois. For these have a new practice Of making elegant consonance In loud and soft music, In ficta, rests, and mutation; And they have partaken of the English Manner, and followed Dunstable; Whereby a marvellous pleasingness Renders their song joyous and worthy. Martin le Franc, Le champion des dames, c. 1438-42 (trans. Scott Metcalfe) At this time, consequently, the possibilities of our music have been so marvelously increased that there appears to be a new art, if I may so call it, whose fount and origin is held to be among the English, of whom Dunstable stood forth as chief. Contemporary with him in France were Dufay and Binchoys… Johannes Tinctoris, Proportionale musices, early 1470s (trans. Oliver Strunk) The mellifluous style or contenance angloise composers in the manuscript known as Henry pioneered by John Dunstaple and other English VIII’s Songbook, as well as songs in courtly composers changed the musical landscape Anglo-French like Adew mes amours by William on both sides of the Channel, in the courts of Cornysh—who as a Gentleman of Henry’s England, France, and Burgundy. The destinies Chapel Royal visited France in September 1513 of these three rival powers were linked for and again in 1520 on the occasion of the Field centuries, no closer than in the fifteenth of the Cloth of Gold. century, which saw an English king crowned in Paris, French nobles held hostage for decades Today’s program offers a few glimpses of in England, and Burgundian dukes allied now music and musical exchanges on either side with one side, now the other. Musicians, too, of the Channel, from the first decades of the traversed water and frontiers, seeking work fifteenth century to the court of the young where they could find it. Dunstaple served John, Henry VIII. We open with the well-known Duke of Bedford, and may have travelled to Deo gracias Anglia, giving thanks for the English France with him during his regency; Binchois triumph at Agincourt on St. Crispin’s Day, 1415. seems to have been in the employ of William de Among the many French nobles taken captive la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, for a few years before he that day was Charles d’Orléans, the nephew of joined the court of Burgundy in the late 1420s; Charles I of France and father of the future Louis Walter Frye was in the service of Anne of Exeter, XII. Charles would spend the next twenty-five elder sister of Edward IV and Margaret of York, years as a prisoner in England, where (among when Margaret married Charles the Bold, Duke other entertainments) he diverted himself by of Burgundy, in 1468; Robert Morton was a clerk writing poetry. Many of the French poems in his and in the chapel choir of the Burgundian court autograph collection have English counterparts from 1457 to 1476, under both Philip the Good in a manuscript, now at the British Library, and Charles the Bold. (The document recording whose lines claim to be written by “the duk his appointment describes him as a “chappelain that folkis calle / Of Orlyaunce.” Among the angloix,” otherwise we might assume he was English poems is a version of “Adieu ma tresbelle French.) Music crossed national boundaries maistresse,” a lyric otherwise not known, so with even greater ease, spreading from England perhaps this, too, may be by Charles. The song, across the entire Continent in the early decades transmitted anonymously, has been convincingly of the century; the flow was largely reversed attributed to Binchois; certainly it is in a style by the later 1400s, as is demonstrated by highly reminiscent of his. More questions of the plethora of works by French and Flemish attribution surround Je suy si povre. Given a French title in one source, a Latin text in another, without an error in the second section. Though and a German incipit in a third, and ascribed to transmitted exclusively with Latin words, the Du Fay in a continental manuscript, it may in fact piece is in the form of an English ballade and may be of English origin and feels much more like an well be a contrafact of a secular song. Morton’s ornamented instrumental version of a song than Le souvenir de vous me tue is justly famous, one a song per se. We perform it on instruments. of the most captivating songs of its era. We pair The ascription of Craindre vous vueil to Du Fay, it with another of Morton’s few songs (there are on the other hand, seems beyond question, and less than ten), the charming Plus j’ay le monde shows beautifully how the young composer— regardé (not in Leuven, it lacks all but its first born near Brussels, but working in Italy by stanza), and follow it with another ballade, the time he wrote this song—transformed the probably English, whose text was entirely ravishingly sweet style heard in Dunstaple’s omitted by its non-English copyists. To conclude Speciosa facta es, alternating moment by moment the set, another poem by Charles d’Orléans, this between major and minor triads.