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Sad Steps - new settings of renaissance poems Audio Samples |
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Tracks 1.
My lute, awake! (variations on a theme by Gail Gillispie) Andrew
Keeling text Sir Thomas Wyatt |
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Notes In 1998, the members of Virelai conceived the idea of commissioning a series of new settings of renaissance love poems. Andrew Keeling and Elizabeth Liddle were the first composers we approached, and some of the pieces recorded here were first performed in August of 2000, in Radovljica, Slovenia. Over time, the project became in effect a collaborative song cycle. I call it a “cycle” because all of the composers (though they didn’t actually work together) were given the same brief: to write a short piece for voice, renaissance flute, viol and lute, setting a renaissance love poem (or to write an instrumental piece to puncutate the songs). It is therefore tied together by related themes and scorings. More amazingly, the various songs and instrumental pieces complement each other in previously unimagined ways. A great diversity of musical and poetic styles appears here, and yet there is a sense of complementarity. The cycle is also open-ended: we hope that this CD is a beginning, not an ending, to the process of gathering material. Renaissance words, renaissance instruments, contemporary settings: this project ties together the worlds of early and contemporary music, and raises many interesting questions about composition, performance, text setting, the use of early instruments for new music and the relationship of old to new generally. We are deeply indebted to all of the composers who contributed to this project. From us to them, profound thanks. Jacob Heringman, 2002 Andrew Keeling's music has been performed, broadcast and recorded by such musicians as Evelyn Glennie, Fretwork, Opus 20 and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. With How Sad Steps, O Moon and My Lute, Awake! were commissioned by and are dedicated to Virelai. Both pieces were premiered at the Radovljica Festival in Slovenia in August 2000. This
arrangement of Trio, from King Crimson's 1973 album Starless and
Bible Black is for flute, treble viol and bass lute. It was originally
performed by violin, mellotron (flute) and bass guitar. Sonnet
105 of Shakespeare is an arrangement for voice and lute of a choral
work written in 1992 as a wedding gift. The short prelude, A Fancy,
is intended to portray some of the mercurial aspects of love,
the nature of which is addressed in the poem. When
searching for a suitable text to set I was struck by the potential
melancholy of Songe 17. The music reflects what I read as the
sadness within the poem; the instruments comment on the text and
the lute provides a harmonic thread around which the other lines
weave gentle, spare counterpoint. Gestures are pared down to a
minimum and the piece is a study in understatement, the lute closing
the setting questioning, rather than resolving, the resignation
inherent in the voice. A
fragment of the mermaid’s song The rondeau set here is taken from chapter 22 of Rabelais’s Pantagruel. Panurge is Rabelais’s anti-hero, a Villonesque character who appears in all of Rabelais’s novels bar Gargantua. A petty thief, an inveterate prankster and womaniser, he writes this rondeau to “a noblewoman of Paris” whom he repeatedly (and ultimately unsuccessfully) attempts to seduce. (One of his chat-up lines, “Ma dame, saichez je suis tant amoureux de vous, que je n’en peuz ny pisser ni fianter”, is entirely characteristic.) This rondeau is his final gambit; when it fails (inexplicably…), he avenges himself on her by playing a particularly dirty trick. Per Serafino Calbarsi I: Rondeau de Panurge was commissioned by Virelai, and is dedicated to my wife Lois - a belated and entirely inappropriate wedding present. Finally,
Serafino Calbarsi (or Serafin Calobarsi) is one of the anagrammatic
pseudonyms of François Rabelais. Just
the once to you, most beauteous lady I
do you no wrong in discovering my heart to you I memorised these poems of Robert Herrick as an adolescent, and they have lain in my mind ever since. When Virelai asked for love songs, it was an opportunity to taste again the sweet agonies of young love, and to find musical expression for the recollection. The
Tombeau started as an experiment with the open string sonorities
of the treble and bass viols, but somehow became infused with
the Proustian taste-memories of the Herrick poems, and became
a kind of tombeau for the bittersweetness of innocence. Chenette’s
music for Charles Best’s “A Sonnet of the Moon”
evokes tidal forces through the flow and ebb of melodies that
sometimes approach closely to each other without quite touching
and then draw far apart. In Best’s poetic conceit, the rising
tides respond to the pull of the moon, just as the lover’s
joy hinges on the nearness of the beloved. Loose imitative relationships
among the musical lines mirror this dependent but changeable joy. Orpheus with his Lute is a setting of a song-text from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. ~ Virelai was founded in 1991 by leading performers in the world of early music with a desire to illuminate neglected repertoire of the late middle ages and early renaissance, a fascination of the juxtaposition of old and new, and in the spirit of exploration and creativity. Virelai
made its Wigmore Hall debut in 1993, and has since performed in
Prague Castle, the Manchester Early Music Series, the Magenta
Music Festival, on the Dutch and British Early Music Networks,
and in broadcasts of both old and new music for the BBC. |
