Lammermuir Festival: Sansara 1 – Stabat Mater
Our Lady of Loretto, Musselburgh - 16/09/22
My final visit to the Lammermuir Festival took me to Our Lady of Loretto in Musselburgh, a lovely little Catholic church, tucked away behind the main street of the Honest Toun. Dating from 1903, it is a cruciform building with lovely gold leaf carvings along the sides of the nave, and a splendid acoustic. For future reference, bring a cushion, if you take my meaning!
This was a concert given by Sansara, one of a number of excellent small choral groups which have sprung up in Britain since the Millennium, who seem to specialise in mixing a cappella singing with electronic music. Before I get into the pros and cons of electronic music, it is important to say right away that Sansara, eight singers, two to each voice, are very good. They have a good blend of voices, one or two slightly quirky but not detrimentally so, and are capable of a fine range of sound from very quiet to full belt (a technical term!). The two sopranos are nicely contrasted, the purity of Fiona Fraser with the more operatic (in a good way) Lucy Cox, and they have a sonorous bass next to a smoother baritone. It is crucial in small ensembles to have the right basses and sopranos, as they rather define the group’s sound. My own experience of the peerless Hilliard Ensemble, with whom I sang many times in Arvo Pärt’s ‘Passio’, shows that their success depended on the wonderful countertenor of David James at the top and the flexible baritone of Gordon Jones. This is in no way to diminish the importance of the interior voices, but if the outer ones are right, then the general sound is defined.
Speaking of personal experience, I was delighted to discover that Fiona Fraser had sung the role of the boy in Mendelssohn’s ‘Elijah’, in which I sang the title role a few years ago in Stirling. Small world!
The concert began with a purely electronic piece by Jonathan Harvey, ‘Mortuos plangos, vivos voco’ in which samples of a bell from Winchester Cathedral and the composer’s boy soprano son singing, are blended and distorted into a musical work. I have to confess that the line from the New Vaudeville Band’s hit from 1966, ‘Winchester Cathedral’, - “She wouldn’t have gone far away, if only you’d started ringing your bell!” - did cross my mind during this piece, and with nothing to look at in the church, I dreamily contemplated the floor. Looking up again at the end, I discovered that the eight members of Sansara had slipped in unnoticed, as if beamed down by Scottie from Star Trek.
This immediately endeared the group to me, and their beautiful rendition of Josquin des Prez’ motet “Inviolata, integra et casta es Maria’ confirmed my view. This was very polished singing of a Renaissance masterpiece and established the group’s sound for the rest of the evening. That was important, since in the second half their sound was enhanced and changed electronically. It is crucial in these circumstances that the listener knows the basic sound of an ensemble to allow him to judge the success or otherwise of the enhancement.
‘The Annunciation’, a work written for the choir of St John’s College in Cambridge by Jonathan Harvey in 2011, was the first piece in the programme to combine live a cappella with electronics. Starting with a direct quote from Palestrina’s ‘Stabat Mater’, a recurring theme of the concert, Harvey in one of his last works set Edwin Muir’s poem ‘The Annunciation’, with electronic noises off, as it were. It would have helped having the Muir words in the programme, because musical word setting is often impossible to understand, as it proved here. The resulting work was interesting, and not unpleasant.
The first half ended with a straight version of Palestrina’s great double choir motet, ‘Stabat Mater’, beautifully performed by Sansara, the eight solo voices caressing the eight part music with velvety perfection, and leading us through the sad story of the mother of God watching the crucifixion of her son, the intimate and the divine blending to produce one of the greatest works of the Renaissance. Whatever one’s take on the Catholic obsession with Mary and the gruesome depiction of the crucifixion in painting and in the words of many of the Marian texts, there is no doubt that Palestrina created a work of near perfection in the ‘Stabat Mater’, and this rendition by Sansara was very fine indeed, the two choirs separately and together producing a vocal blend of eloquent smoothness.
After the interval, Sansara, directed vividly by Tom Herring, and the composer and electronic maestro, Joe Bates, combined to give us a good example of what modern technology and fine musicianship can do together. In ‘Ceasing’ by Mr Bates, first heard in London in 2019, the composer has drawn on interviews with the members of Sansara about their experiences of death, on his own personal experience of the death of his grandmother, on the Stabat Mater text, and other poetry, along with extraneous sounds and static. The singers were miked and Joe Bates controlled the whole work from his laptop at the side, modifying, changing and balancing throughout. The resultant piece, presumably subtly different each time it is played, was largely successful in blending live voices, enhanced but live nonetheless, with pre-recorded material.
The middle piece in the second half was ‘O Nata Lux’, famously set by Thomas Tallis in the 16th century, one of the most perfect Renaissance works, and here composed by Rhiannon Randle (born 1993), and dedicated to her late grandmother. The voices were still enhanced but this didn’t interfere with the lovely rendition by Sansara.
The final work, referred to by the Festival Director as a masterpiece, was the UK premiere of Jonathan Harvey’s 2004 ‘Stabat Mater’. The arrangement combines three versions of the Palestrina ‘Stabat Mater’: one sung live by the choir, one processed live from the microphones and one pre-recorded by another choir and transposed. The obsolescence of the original digital material meant that the work was unperformable for years, but painstaking restoration, supported by the Lammermuir Festival and Faber Music, allowed us to hear it for the first time since 2004.
It was certainly hugely impressive and wonderfully performed by Sansara and Joe Bates on the electronic side, and made for a fine closing piece for the concert, but I was left, perhaps naively and perhaps missing something, wondering why? I was reminded of a concert I did a few years ago in the Scottish Portrait Gallery, to celebrate the legacy of Robert Burns, centred around Douglas Gordon’s work, ‘Black Burns’, a reworking in black marble of Flaxman’s 1824 statue of Burns by Gordon, and then smashed into a number of pieces.
I wondered then why anyone would want deliberately to destroy a work of art (even a copy), and here I wondered why someone would choose to create something so dissonant out of a work of such perfection as Palestrina’s ‘Stabat Mater’?
However, I am most grateful to the Lammermuir Festival for creating the conditions for this question to be asked, and it is entirely legitimate so to do.
The festival continues until Sunday 18 September, the final performance by Jeremy Denk and the Royal Northern Sinfonia, scheduled for Monday 19 September, having been cancelled out of respect for the funeral of Her Majesty the Queen on that date.
