A Madrigal Wonderland

Aberlady Parish Church, 15/9/24

Gesualdo Six

I’ve always been a little ambivalent about madrigals. Ever since, as a member of the George Watson’s Boys College Madrigal Group in 1973, I competed in the Edinburgh Competition Festival in the Madrigal Section, and lost, I’ve held a small grudge about jolly Elizabethan singing. The adjudicator, a lugubrious Yorkshireman, damned us with faint praise - “Your fa la las were quite nice,” he said!

So when I saw that the matchless Gesualdo Six were presenting a concert of Madrigals in Aberlady Parish Church, my mind wandered to the horrific possibility that I might not enjoy their show. Oh, me of little faith! I should have known better! Not only was there not a fa la la to be heard, but this superb ensemble demonstrated that my prejudice was silly, and that madrigals rock!

It must be said that their choice of madrigals was impeccable. A first half of mainly Italian pieces and a couple of English gems was followed by a witty and brilliantly sung second half of modern secular part songs by Ligeti, Judith Weir and Sarah Rimkus.

I have been raving about the Gesualdo Six on these pages for a few years now, and after their brilliant concert on Saturday night in Musselburgh of funereal music, it was quite a leap to hear them singing a secular programme. In addition, Aberlady Parish Church has a completely different acoustic to Our Lady of Loretto, but actually the two venues were perfectly appropriate for the programmes. The warm and ethereal sound of the Musselburgh church was perfect for the glories of Renaissance polyphony, while the drier acoustic of Aberlady suited the clearer and wordier texts of the madrigals. As usual, the interesting and witty introductions by the director of the group, Owain Park, proved a perfect match to the singing, although like the night before, I would have appreciated the English texts being printed in the otherwise admirable programmes along with the foreign language ones. With the best will in the world, texts sung by vocal ensembles are almost impossible to understand, as often many voices are singing different words. Maybe a thought for next year’s programmes?

 Today’s programme kicked off with three madrigals by Marenzio, Palestrina and Maddalena Casulana, all on the subjects of love, death and life, a far cry from the nymphs and shepherds of Diana, so beloved of the English madrigalists. I was intrigued to see how the Gesualdo Six, a delightful bunch of Oxbridge graduates, well-brought up young lads, would deal with the passion and fire of the Italian madrigal composers. When they moved on to Gesualdo and Monteverdi, I wondered whether they would change from their smooth English style. Che sciocca! Silly me! Of course they did! Their singing and even their gestures and movement transported us to sunny Italy, as they perfectly captured all the intricacies of the Italian texts. Their voice production opened up, and there was more light and shade in the singing, with bigger crescendi and diminuendi, and a proper feeling of the heart on sleeve nature of Italian speech. This was for me a big test of their skills, as when I am coaching young singers in the Italian repertoire, I often have to physically shake up the singer to find the essential characteristics of Italian people (in an entirely appropriate and measured way of course!). The Gesualdos found it with ease.

The myth that a mute swan suddenly cries out at the moment of death has given rise to many exquisite songs and madrigals, none better than ‘The Silver Swan’ by Orlando Gibbons, which we heard immediately after the earlier ‘Il bianco e dolce cigno’ (the white and sweet swan) by Jacques Arcadelt. The Italian version, composed by the Belgian madrigalist, was one of the most popular madrigals of the 16th century, and would certainly have been known to Gibbons. Both pieces are exquisite, but The Silver Swan is a masterpiece. I have sung it since I was a boy and know four of the five parts!

The first half concluded with two madrigals by giants of the Elizabethan period, William Byrd and Thomas Weelkes. Byrd was apparently loath to corrupt his essentially English style with dodgy foreign inventions, so wrote very few madrigals, but this one is rather jolly. Weelkes was a prolific composer during his life, which was punctuated by reprimands for drunkenness and swearing  (he sounds as if he lived life to the full!), and today, we heard his ‘As Vesta was from Latmos hill descending’, one of many contributions to the 1601 collection known as ‘The Triumphs of Oriana’, a celebration of the glories of Queen Elizabeth. This brilliant piece is a masterly example of early word painting, with clever devices like ascending and descending scales on the words “running down amain”.

The audience, another full house by the way, stumbled out into the September sunshine to stretch our legs at the interval, and discuss the wonders we had heard. 

Wonderment continued as the Gesualdo Six regaled us with Thomas Weelkes’ astonishing ‘Thule, the Period of Cosmography,’ a madrigal like no other, in which the pioneering spirit of the Elizabethans and their fascination with foreign lands is somehow set to music. Again, the printed words would have been enormously helpful here, as it would have been with most of the second half, including, as it did, Györgi Ligeti’s Nonsense Madrigals, written between 1988 and 1993 with texts drawn from the works of Lewis Carroll and Heinrich Hoffman. The Gesualdo Six really let their hair down for this half of the programme and gave us a feel for the clever but silly words. Unlike last night, Joseph Wicks’ more demonstrative style of singing fitted this programme very well, and it was clear that the boys were having a great time, while also singing phenomenally difficult music superbly. Judith Weir’s composition for the 60th birthday in 2008 of Stephen Cleobury, musical director of Kings College Chapel and the BBC Singers during his career, took the form of a village celebration of a birthday. I sang Christus in a couple of Bach Passions with Stephen in Kings in the 90s and found him a dedicated musician and a charming man. His relatively early death at 70 in 2019 was a great loss to the English musical scene.

The concert ended with a beautiful modern madrigal by Sarah Rimkus, ‘My Heart is like a Singing Bird’, which Owain Park in his notes told us is one of the ensemble’s favourite works. It was cheered to the rafters, such that we were given a lovely encore, a work by Eleanor Daley.

 This seemed a fitting way to end my experience of this year’s Lammermuir Festival. Through a combination of illnesses and bad luck, I was the only reviewer from the EMR at the Festival, and because my area of expertise is vocal music, we were unable to cover the excellent other music in this splendid 10 days of music in East Lothian. Word of mouth tells me that there were many absolutely fabulous concerts which I missed, and huge congratulations are in order to the Artistic Directors, Hugh Macdonald and James Waters, for their imaginative and fascinating programming, and the top quality of all the performers.

Thanks also are due to the army of dedicated volunteers who organise the parking, ushering and shepherding needed for a festival which prides itself on using venues not normally given over to concerts.

We can only hope that those in charge of the financial kitty for the Arts in Scotland can see the huge success of this festival and make more funds available for next year and the future. I look forward to the next one!