In search of time gone by | concert 16 May 2012 |

University Church in Wrocław

________________

Programme

A. In search of time past

1. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) :

                        O wir armen Sünder                                                                                     |1’45

2. Michelangelo Rossi (1601-1656) :

                        Per non mi dir ch’io moia                                                                             |4’54

3. Orlando di Lasso (1532-1594) :

                        Comme la Tourterelle                                                                                   |3’50

4. Jacob Clement  (ca.1515-1556) :

                        Qui consolabatur                                                                                          |5’00

5. Alexander Agricola (1446-1506) :

                        Fortuna Desperata                                                                                        |5’37

6. Guillaume De Machault (1300-1377) :

                        Kyrie from the Mass of Notre Dame                                                            |6’

7. Anonymus, ca. 1250 :

                        O Maria Maris Stella                                                                                    |4’15

8. Anonymus, 800 :

                “Laudes Regiae” for the coronation of Charlemagne in the year 800           |11’00

INTERMISSION

B. Into the future

1. Anonymus, ca. 1280 :

                        Belial Vocatur                                                                                              |5’36

2. Guillaume De Machault (1300-1377) :

                        Gloria from the Mass of Notre Dame                                                                          |5’

3. Alexander Agricola (1446-1506) :

                        Agnus Dei from the Mass In Minen                                                                        |8’26

4. Jacob Clement (ca.1515-1556) :

                        Je prens en gré & Response: Mourir me fault                                                |7’

5. Orlando di Lasso (1532-1594) :

                        Agnus Dei from the Triste Départ Mass                                                                  |5’

6. Michelangelo Rossi (1601-1656) :

                        Occhi, un tempo mia vita                                                                             |3’56

7. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) :                                                                       

                        O wir armen Sünder                                                                                     |1’45

Cast of the concert HUELGAS ENSEMBLE À la recherche du temps perdu at the University Church in Wrocław | 16/05/2012

CANTUS:          Poline Renou, Axelle Bernage, Christel Boiron                             

ALTUS:             Achim Schulz

TENOR:            Bernd Oliver Fröhlich, George Pooley, Tom Phillips, Matthew Vine 

BARITONE:        Erik Van Nevel                                                 

BASS:                 Guillaume Olry

Conductor and artistic director: Paul Van Nevel

HUELGAS ENSEMBLE

The Huelgas Ensemble was founded by Paul Van Nevel in 1970 at the famous Schola Cantorum in Basel. The name comes from a Cistercian monastery located near the Spanish city of Burgos. Initially specialising in contemporary music, the ensemble soon concentrated on the performance of medieval and renaissance music, working from the beginning on original sources and making a lively contribution to early music research. The ensemble’s repertoire abounds with surprising, little-known works by composers such as Nicolas Gombert, Claude Le Jeune, Johannes Ciconia, Pierre de Manchicourt and others. The performance art of the Huelgas Ensemble is underpinned by a deep understanding of medieval and Renaissance vocal techniques. The ensemble has recorded more than 50 CDs for Sony and Harmonia Mundi, and its many accolades include the Belgian Music Critics’ Caecilia Price Award, Le Monde de la Musique Choc de l’Année, the Edison Prize, the Cannes Classical Award and the “Prix in honorem” of the Charles Cros Academy and the German ECHO Classic Award (2011).

The Huelgas Ensemble is subsidised by the Flemish government and the city of Louvain.

PAUL VAN NEVEL

Artistic director of the Huelgas Ensemble, founded in 1970 as an extension of its activities in the Schola Cantorum. With an interdisciplinary approach to original sources, penetrating the spirit of the period (literature, ancient pronunciation, temperament and tempo, rhetoric…), Paul Van Nevel continues to discover new works – especially forgotten treasures of Flemish polyphony. He is a guest professor at the Hannover Conservatory. He regularly conducts other ensembles such as the Nederlands Kamerkoor and the Danish Radio Choir. He has written a monograph on Johannes Ciconia and a study on the works of Nicolas Gombert. He has also published numerous transcriptions of Renaissance music in the Bärenreiter publishing house. He has received various distinctions: Prix in Honorem de l’Académie Charles Cros (1994), numerous Diapasons D’Or, Cannes Classical Award (for the Mass “L’Homme armé” in 1998), Le Choc de l’année 2000 (Le Monde de la Musique).

HUELGAS ENSEMBLE – BIOGRAFIA

Anyone who had the privilege of attending the first concerts of Paul Van Nevel and the fledgling Huelgas Ensemble in the 1970s – still talks about them today. Two words come to mind: intimidation and delight. The awe remains, even though more than three decades have passed. The intimidation that accompanies listening to the untamed, new sounds of old music, the echoes of centuries ago – should have diminished with time. And yet it has not lessened. This is the reason why the Huelgas Ensemble has not yet left the stage. Again and again, it revives the works of forgotten masters. Paul and his ensemble can never get tired of them, their loyal listeners are never bored, and new listeners are always stunned by their enthusiasm.

A few years ago, after the band’s first concert in New York, the prominent Newsday magazine wrote about the “magnificently tuned instrument” and the fact that New York finally understood what it had been missing for so many years. “The New York Times briefly described Huelgas as a superb. Similar hymns of praise can be heard from the United States to Japan, not excluding Europe of course: Saintes, Brussels, Rijsel, Klagenfurt, Evora… One could go on for a long time.

Paul Van Nevel is sometimes referred to as a music detective, Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. It’s true – he spends half his life combing through libraries. As the poem celebrating this Illustrimus magister polyphoniae, the famous master of polyphony, proclaims:

                  You break into paper dungeons

                  You patiently search for the right key

                  And from the cages of the stave

                  You release the voices of Europe.

“Ploughing through” Paul Van Nevel’s manuscripts of many centuries ago freed names such as Nicolas Gombert, Claude Le Jeune, Johannes Ciconia, Pierre de Manchicourt and many others from the hermetic circle of a few musicologists. The Huelgas founder’s research has also translated into the penetrating, erudite precision with which the ensemble performs forgotten music. Their interpretations demonstrate a deep understanding of the prevailing musical views of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

It must be said that Paul Van Nevel is supremely adept at reading ancient notation and Latin texts, but he does not stop there. He places music in the broader intellectual and cultural context of the period, and studies classical rhetoric and humoral pathology. He explores the latter by dealing with the great medieval scholastic Albertus Magnus, the former in connection with the teatro della memoria of the Italian Renaissance humanist Giullia Camilla Delmimia. It also takes into account the literary canons in force during the composers’ lifetime.

Characteristic of the Huelgas Ensemble is the exceptional purity of sound. Each of the twelve voices clearly manifests its presence, melding with the others at the same time, resulting in a harmonious symphony of sound – at times massive, at others delicate, and often very passionate. The Huelgas Ensemble sounds like a fusion of heaven and earth.

Not particularly surprisingly, Paul Van Nevel and his ensemble are frequent recipients of awards. The Cecciliaprijs of the Belgian music press, the Choc de l’Année of France’s Le Monde de la Musique, the Edison Prize, the Cannes Classical Award in Early Music, the Prix in honorem of the Charles Cros Academy, the Honours Award of the European Radio Union and Canadian Radio – this is a far from complete list, but is certainly enough to guarantee the highest quality and to encourage every music lover to include dozens of albums by the Huelgas Ensemble in their collection. The ensemble records regularly for Sony Classics (Vivarte series) and Harmonia Mundi.

There is something shocking about the moment when the Huelgas Ensemble breaks the silence. Not so much shocking or sensational as filling one with deep humility, nostalgia and the utmost respect and admiration for the strangely familiar beauty of Europe’s musical treasures. This music comes alive the moment the creative spirit (Paul Van Nevel) discovers it and lasts as long as he masterfully tunes it.

    Geert van Istendael – Belgian writer, essayist and music lover

À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of things past) : in search of lost sounds
 
The musical journey undertaken by the Huelgas Ensemble this evening consists of two parts that form each other’s mirror image. The first part sets off during the Baroque era and goes back in time via the Renaissance, ending up in the Middle Ages. The second part does the opposite, starting with the 13th-century Ars Antiqua and finally arriving back at the evening’s starting point – a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach.
 
Each stage of this journey is dedicated to a compositional high point of a musical era. That the journey both starts and finishes with Bach will not surprise the listener. Still in the 21st century his work is considered a ‘bible’ of contrapuntal music. Although this evening’s chorale was never used by Bach in a cantata or Passion, it is nonetheless a highlight of his chorale oeuvre, which is recorded in his famous chorale collection, published after Bach’s death by his son Carl Philip Emanuel.
 
One element of this programme that represents the Middle Ages is one of the main forms found in ArsAntiqua, the motet. O Maria Maris Stella was probably one of the most popular works of the 13th century: it is recorded in practically all the major Ars Antiqua manuscripts, at first for two voices, but it later acquired a third and even a fourth voice. 
Typical of medieval polyphony: each part had a different text.
 
Guillaume De Machaut can undoubtedly be described as the pinnacle of the late Middle Ages. The Messe de Nostre Dame, moreover, occupies a central position in his oeuvre. The four-voice counterpoint is a sharply delineated Gothic language in which every imaginable rhythmic and harmonic technique, such as hoquetusfigures and double leading tones, can be heard in turn.
 
The early Renaissance is represented by a contemporary and colleague of Josquin Desprez, Alexander Agricola. His art brought him fame even during his own lifetime – but also notoriety, because of his daring counterpoint which continually surprises the listener due to its virtuosic rhythmic confrontations. A high point in the mathematical art of proportion. 
 
The composers of the High and Late Renaissance have nothing more to do with Agricola’s whimsical and surprising art. Both Jacob Clement and Orlandus Lassus are striving after a humanist art, in which the word and its meaning are the Alpha and Omega of the counterpoint. 
Jacob Clement is probably the most tragic composer of the Renaissance, ruined as he was by an alcohol addiction for which, even at that time, he had become notorious. His highly melancholic compositions form a high point in the a cappella art of the 16^th century. 
 
Michelangelo Rossi’s madrigal  is in every respect an odd man out – not only in this programme, but also in the history of the 17th century. His daring harmonic twists and turns, enharmonic  chromaticism and choice of keys (e.g. G-sharp major and  D-flat minor) were already during his lifetime the subject of disbelief and discussion. Pietro della Valle, a contemporary of Rossi, writes in his Della Musica dell’età nostra that Rossi undoubtedly belongs among the finest composers because of his inventive counterpoint. 
 
Paul Van Nevel