Lammermuir Festival: The Marian Consort
Long ago, in the mists of time, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, when Edward Heath was Prime Minister, and when Great Britain had just joined the European Common Market, I discovered Renaissance Choral Music. St Andrews University, a dinosaur-free zone but a hotbed of Conservative students, was the venue for this apocalyptic event. As a new undergraduate, keen on singing, I had been told I must join the university Renaissance Group, and so I wandered along to a chaotic house on the Scores, overlooking the West Sands, where I sang some song or other, and failed a sight-singing test. The eccentric auditioner, one Professor Gifford of the Spanish Department, told me with a worried glance, that obviously I had no idea about sight reading but that I seemed to possess a decent voice, and that he would give me a chance. We started rehearsing that night, and I fell in love with Renaissance Church music. As a recently confirmed atheist, I had no liturgical or spiritual interest in this music, but somehow it went to my heart and has remained there ever since, although I rarely get to sing it nowadays. A couple of years later, I fell in love again, this time with a gorgeous alto from Helensburgh who had recently joined the choir.
Nearly 50 years later, that same alto (now Mrs Bannatyne-Scott) and I arrived at St Mary’s, Haddington, for the last of our series of concerts at the Lammermuir Festival, given by the Marian Consort.
After three fantastic previous concerts, we were full of anticipation for this programme, entitled Renaissance Protest Songs, an unlikely title, but intriguing. Duly masked and socially distanced, we sat in reverential silence, until a young lady appeared on stage and launched into song. She was soon joined by five more young people, singing what appeared to be a lusty song in Italian. Suitable applause gave way to a very pleasant young man with a Scottish accent, who introduced us to the programme of the concert. This was the director and countertenor of the Marian Consort, Rory McCleery, educated in Edinburgh and a former chorister at St Mary’s Cathedral in the West End of the city. Now a distinguished academic and performer, he explained that the concert had three sections, all protesting in some way against the mores of the time. We had just heard a street song from 15th century Florence, inspired by the fiery friar, Girolamo Savonarola. Many of these songs had extremely bawdy origins, but Savonarola and his followers transformed them into pleas for a return to Christ and modest behaviour in the midst of a sea of decadence. Later, after Savonarola’s burning as a heretic in 1498 (the Church didn’t want anyone causing any trouble, even one searching for piety), these songs developed into expressions of veneration for the martyred firebrand, often declaimed by gangs of marauding but pious young men!
Another strand of the programme was music by 16th and early 17th century Portuguese composers, expressing, through their music, a dangerous message of freedom from the Spanish Habsburgs and a desire for the return of the Portuguese monarchy. This movement grew from the cult of ‘Sebastianism’, a belief that the young King Sebastian, who had vanished in Morocco in 1578, would one day return and banish the Spanish usurpers. The texts used by these composers were chosen to hint at these dangerous notions, but also had the additional merit, for this concert, of being allied to rather fine music!
The final strand in the programme, slightly tenuous but acceptable, was the music of three of the greatest of the Tudor composers, White, Tallis and Byrd, who had to keep their noses clean through the religious nightmare that roller-coastered through the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I. Finding a safe route through these reigns as a composer and conductor of religious music was enormously difficult and dangerous, as court life lurched from Protestantism back to Catholicism and then back again. Backing the wrong horse, as it were, could be extremely costly, in terms of head preservation or avoidance of body burning. These three composers were thought to be Catholics, but each had his way of keeping on the right side of the law, some more openly than others.
Somehow, these three strands fitted together to make a stunning concert, magnificently sung by the Marian Consort, who are made up of two sopranos, an alto, a countertenor, a tenor and a bass, all fresh-faced and fresh-voiced. While enjoying all the voices, which were nicely individual but blended particularly well, I found the two sopranos, Caroline Halls and Lucy Cox, exceptional. Very well contrasted but retaining high quality sound, they both put over the gorgeous top notes of the ensemble to perfection.
In a concert with so many short pieces, one or two works stood out. It is no insult to the Portuguese and Italian music to say that the works by the three English composers were in a class apart. Readers of my Blogs will know that I am a great fan of both Byrd and Tallis (see my articles on the EMR Blog – A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers), and the pieces here were very fine. Tallis’ ‘Lamentations of Jeremiah’, of which we heard Part 1 last night, are among the greatest works of choral music ever written, deeply moving and enormously expressive, revealing, perhaps, his frustration with the prevailing shift in religious practice in Tudor England, which he, as a Catholic, found deeply distressing. The Marian Consort revealed all the longing and despair felt by Tallis at the time, in a performance of great subtlety and beauty.
The works by Byrd and White, although not quite in the Lamentations class, were superb vehicles for the young singers to exploit. The combination of Rory McCleery’ s pleasant countertenor with Rosie Parker’s rich mezzo was an undoubted success, and the two lower voices, Edward Ross (tenor) and Edmund Saddington (bass) both revealed a smooth and even tonal quality which never flagged. To sing one part alone for over an hour is something of a tour de force, and both these gentlemen were excellent throughout.
It was fun for the singers to let their hair down, metaphorically, in the Italian pieces, and one can imagine what fun they would have had if they had been able to sing the naughty versions of the Savonarola songs. “The Crazies for Jesus” (as these young Florentines were known) must have been a strange sight around town, especially as the words they were singing were at odds with the music we heard. Heaven knows what the non-fanatic folk of Florence made of them.
So, all in all, this was an admirable concert, well-attended like all the Lammermuir concerts I have been to. My only sadness, and this is not confined to these performances, is seeing new groups of predominantly young musicians, of a very high standard, singing to audiences with an average age of, at the very least, 50! It’s not just ticket prices, which I thought were about right and reflected the international standard of performers I heard, or the problem of a festival a good distance from a large population centre The same was true for the Edinburgh Festival performances I saw last month, with a strikingly similar audience demographic. People of the age I was when I first went to classical concerts and operas are simply not coming now. Education will help a bit, and we need governments to make music more available and obvious, but things like appointing Nadine Dorries as the UK’S Culture Minister reveal a chasm at the heart of power, which belittles culture as elitist and therefore bad. The appalling mediocrity of what is sold to the public as Classical Music, the Katherine Jenkins’ or Andrea Bocelli’s, for example, give no clue as to the riches awaiting those who try to find out the wonders of great music. I realise I am preaching to the converted here, as anyone reading this review will already be interested, but I really don’t know how or if we can reverse the trend? I do know that there are many very fine young musicians coming through the system, I work with some of them and coach some, but they need an audience to play to.
However, let us at least give thanks to the Lammermuir Festival for this year’s excellent programme, and to the Marian Consort for this excellent concert.
