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Christ Church Cathedral
July 20, 2018
That a small vocal group formed less than five years ago should fill Christ Church Cathedral to its side walls clearly came as a very welcome surprise to its director, Owain Park. Their reputation had obviously preceded them, and those of us expecting an intimate affair in the Jerusalem Chapel were shortly to discover why.
In naming the group after the scandal-dogged sixteenth century Italian composer, Carlo Gesualdo, whose inner demons (he was, after all accused of murdering his wife and her lover) produced madrigals of a turbulent intensity which broke all the rules of chromatic harmony, not duplicated for another three centuries, the Gesualdo Six are stating their claim and intention to follow their own musical path with an equally passionate intensity: here in an eclectic programme featuring Byrd and Tallis, Lassus, Poulenc and Thomas Tomkins, interspersed with contemporary composers Eric Whitacre, Gabriel Jackson and Gerda Blok-Wilson and the completely different styles of African American Spirituals, British folk songs and Park's own commemorative war piece, somewhat cryptically named Sequence: In Parenthesis.
From the haunting opening of Byrd's "Ave Verum Corpus", overlapping single voices rising in chromatic harmony as the six young men processed down the aisle, surrounding the audience with unspeakably gentle, seamlessly spacious sound, both muscular and tender, to the concluding folksong, My Love is like a red, red rose, where a potentially trite if not schmaltzy declaration made my skin rise up in acknowledgment of the loving intention being so faithfully expressed in the words, the audience was utterly captivated. Of the marvels that came between, I shall just pick a few highlights. Orlande de Lassus' cry of despair a three part braid of grief, hope and compassion, sinuously twisting lines swelling and fading, vulnerable as eggshells, and as firm. The bass like an age-blackened oak, the tenor and counter tenor sublime, translucent as butterfly wings; the yearning, plaintive melancholy making an insipid thing of more ordinary desolation. The utter quietness of the plea for compassion, the "miserere", a final acceptance in a chord fading like the last gleam of twilight.
The debut performance of Canadian composer Gerda Blok-Wilson's contribution to a trio of pieces taking the rose as its symbolic theme. Titled "O Little Rose, O Dark Rose", it brought to mind, in its child-like simplicity, the passion of St. Exupéry's Petit Prince in its slow build to the flame of desire for his rose on another planet and its inevitable unattainability. There was a naked truth to the voices which seemed born to sing this, leaving nothing to add, and holding nothing back, the final note shimmering like gold leaf.
In a very different vein, Thomas Tomkins' madrigal, "When David Heard", often sung in a religious context begins as a narrative which pierces the heart with the very moment King David hears the news of his son's death. The sombreness of the retreat up the stairs to his room is shattered in his cry of anguish, "O my Son" repeated in shades of sorrow, the tenor voice rising until almost breaking. Emotionally overwhelming, each cadence giving way to one last cry of exhausted pain, at one point the crunch of the chromatic dissonance feeling like lungs about to collapse. A shift in tone from pure anguish to the sense of regret that it was not he who had died in his son's place before reverting again to the anguish of the loss with the sense that this pain will never go away, but may finally be contained in a kind of acceptance.
The most theatrical piece was Owain Park's. With the narrator acting as an observing soldier from the pulpit, a collage of battle scenes and soldiers' thoughts, dreams and fears were evoked using fragments of British and German songs and sayings from pubs, streets and children's play, over a repeated drone of endless exhausting marching, marching, marching. The effect was of a sonic Bayeux Tapestry, with none of the heroics and hearing the homesick sighs and terrors of dying from all sides. The soundscape skipped effortlessly from the deeply sad "es ist ein ros entsprungen" to absurdly macho and miliItaristic fragments and the whole was a remarkably moving renunciation of war.
This eclectic programme was characterized throughout by the sublime ease and deep familiarity these singers brought to their performance, reflecting, I imagine, the long apprenticeship to a choral tradition that as choir boys most of them have probably benefitted from since childhood. Sometimes they seemed more like a set of baroque viols, glorious sounds emerging from motionless instruments with an unseen bow. A sumptuous banquet of fine wines, clarets, brandies and clear white wines from the distinctive terroir of cathedrals, crypts and chapels. The slow grace and stillness, combined with the marriage of sound and meaningful text which allowed their voices to so effortlessly fill a space that has challenged many larger groups suggests a vintage with a very long life ahead of it.
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