Meredith Monk (b.1942): Ellis Island Nina Simone (1933-2003): Good Bait, arr. Joanna MacGregor Eleanor Alberga (b.1949): Clouds for Piano Quintet: Scudding Errollyn Wallen (b.1958): Mighty River Ayanna Witter-Johnson (b.1985): Ain't I a Woman? Colour War Sam Cooke (1931-1964): A Change is Gonna Come, arr. Ayanna Witter-Johnson Ayanna Witter-Johnson: Unconditionally
Florence Price (1887-1953): The Mississippi River
The Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra’s Music Director, Joanna MacGregor took back the baton following Sian Edwards’ visit last month for their concert marking International Women’s Day, Mighty River: Celebrating Women. And this was another great example of imaginative and brave programming, with music most if not all unfamiliar to their audience, who gave enthusiastic responses throughout.
But before taking to the podium, MacGregor opened the concert with two solo piano works. First came Meredith Monk’s watery miniature, Ellis Island, originally written to accompany her 1981 film compiled from footage of immigrants arriving in the USA in the 1900s. MacGregor made the minimalist cascades flow with a fluid lilt, and allowed the brief fragments of melodic material to emerge from the textures, whilst keeping everything atmospherically quiet, particularly at its pianissimo conclusion. She followed this with her own arrangement of Nina Simone’s Good Bait, from her 1958 debut album. From the Bach-like opening, it quickly morphs its bluesy melodic line into jazzier lines over walking bass lines, and then the rhythms and rolling textures intensify, building to a virtuosic, Lisztian conclusion. MacGregor is in her element in this repertoire, and these two striking solo works from two contrasting women composers and performers from the twentieth century (although Monk is of course still composing and performing, now in her eighties) provided a strong opening.
Eleanor Alberga
MacGregor remained at the keyboard, and was joined by the four BPO string principals, for the opening movement from Jamaican born composer, Eleanor Alberga’s Clouds for Piano Quintet, composed in 1984. Scudding conjures up wide skyscapes and shifting clouds, with its sliding, almost sultry solo lines, first from the cello, and then viola. The complex rhythms develop, and at one point, the pizzicato strings sounded reminiscent of the West African kora. There are lots of intricate moments here, and the players clearly enjoyed the challenge of their offbeat rhythms. The music builds and speeds up to an exciting coda with a rapidly repeated pattern – they might not have quite nailed the finish together, but their energy brought this fascinating piece to a lively conclusion. I will definitely have to check out the rest of the Piano Quintet on the back of hearing this.
There was then a brief hiatus as the stage was reset for the full BPO’s arrival (and a rather long wait for the first violins to join – the Music Director shouldn’t have to go off stage to fetch them!), for Errollyn Wallen’s Mighty River. This orchestral work from 2007 was composed to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery, and Wallen blends the spirituals Amazing Grace and Deep River into a rich tapestry of orchestral colours. It opens with a horn solo on Amazing Grace, and whilst this was relatively secure, the tuning when the horn was joined by piccolo and then clarinet could have been purer. However, once the strings began their rhythmic pulsing, with flutters from woodwind and brass, the orchestral sound settled. In the faster, more energetic sections, MacGregor danced through the joyful rhythms, but the orchestra as a whole felt a little cautious in these sections, perhaps as a result of limited rehearsal time, preventing full ownership of the piece. Yet Macgregor managed the frequent rhythmic transitions smoothly, successfully keeping the strings at bay later on as fragments of the spirituals were passed around the orchestra, and the concluding horn solo was much more secure, this time accompanied by the djembe drum, played with impressive attack by Donna-Maria Landowski.
Ayanna Witter-Johnson
After the interval, came a real departure for the BPO, and a welcome injection of something completely different in the programme. Ayanna Witter-Johnson is a singer, cellist and composer from London, and performed four songs, accompanying herself on the cello. Her opening number, Ain’t I a Woman?, based on abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech demanding equal rights for women, showed off her incredibly soulful voice, as well as a virtuosic ability to make the cello sound like a blues guitar. Colour War also had rhythmic pizzicato pulsing accompaniment underpinning her mellow, soulful voice, and her cover of Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come was incredibly powerful, the pared back sound adding strength to this classic protest against injustice and racism. And finally, Unconditionally took her percussive use of the cello to a new level, with the Cuban rumba clave providing the bass for her vocal dexterity to shine out. Her latest EP, including two of these tracks, was released today – more info here. Including such an exciting performer in their concert is another testament to MacGregor and the BPO’s innovative and adventurous programming.
Another hiatus for stage reorganisation (this really needs to get a little slicker), the evening concluded with a majestic performance of Florence Price’sThe Mississippi River. As epic as the river itself, this large scale orchestral work combines four spiritual tunes, an Indigenous American song, ragtime music, and a Creole tune, all flowing one into the other, just like the rapid river. The opening section is full of pastoral woodwind, followed by moving brass chorales, and immediately one sensed the BPO were in a more confident mood here. There were moments of lush Hollywood, and some glorious harp moments (Alex Rider deserves a special mention here, and for his deft contribution in the Wallen earlier in the evening), and there was some remarkably delicate rapid work from the bassoons too. Nothing stays still for long in this piece as we move on down the river, and the build up to the climax was powerfully delivered, before the wind down to the solo trumpet’s Deep River fragment – but the final word was given to more delicate work from Alex Rider on the harp, over glistening, watery strings.
In the month of International Women’s Day, I am happy to say that by chance rather than design, I have ended up with three great recordings to review, as well as a range of concert listings, that feature no fewer than 14 women composers, 4 women conductors and 10 women performers. This shouldn’t be unusual, yet it still us - but it’s a sign of some progress that I haven’t explicitly gone looking for this. Credit should also go to the three recordings’ shared record company, First Hand Records, for supporting such a diverse range of music composed and performed by women.
Reviews
Late last year, The Telling released a new album, partly in response to the very sad and sudden loss of singer Ariane Prüssner earlier that year. The album consists of two soundtracks to ‘concertplays’, something the group have become so well known for. ‘Vision’ is the imagined testimony of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), and‘Unsung Heroine’charts the imagined life and love of troubadour Beatriz de Dia, who was possibly born in the early 1140s and died around 1212. You may have caught both of these concertplays over the years in Brighton, as the other lead singer and founder of The Telling, Clare Norburn was also founder and co-director for many years of Brighton Early Music Festival. The music on this recording consists of soundtracks for film versions of the plays made in 2020 following the first lockdown. Both soundtracks are testament to the chemistry of Clare Norburn’s soaring soprano and Ariane Prüssner’s rich, deep mezzo-soprano, so passionately expressive when combined. In Vision, they explore the beauty but also the pain of Hildegard’s often shocking visions. There are moments of ecstasy, such as when Norburn’s solo line bursts forth above the simple harp accompaniment (Jean Kelly on medieval harp here) in Ave generosa, or when Prüssner’s rich tones circle and wind passionately in Columba aspexit. In Unsung Heroine, we enter the world of the troubadour, with a whole range of songs drawing on Beatrix de Dia’s poetry, some with existing vocal lines, some borrowed from other songs of the time. There’s lots of forbidden love and jealousy here, as well as the distress of betrayal, the latter evocatively expressed by Norburn’s rise to stratospheric heights in Estat ai en greu cossirier (‘I have been in a state of great distress’). Prüssner on the other hand gives us the passion of two lovers and a jealous husband, and a love that can never be, in Kalenda mia (‘May Day’), here accompanied by harp (Joy Smith) and the medieval bowed string instrument, the vielle (Giles Lewin). This disc is a wonderful testament to these two rich explorations of contrasting medieval music, but more importantly to the deep musical partnership between two exceptional singers, one now sadly lost to us.
American pianist, Sarah Cahill, has released the first volume of a three volume series, ‘The Future is Female’, aiming to celebrate women composers right from the 17th century through to the present day. In the first volume, loosely themed ‘In Nature’, the ten composers hail from across the globe, and there are a number of premiere recordings here. The works are presented chronologically, so we begin with a graceful and expressive Keyboard Sonata from Anna Bon (1739/40-after 1767). Born in Venice, she composed for Princess Wilhelmine of Prussia in Bayreuth, then later sang in Haydn’s ensemble at the court of Esterházy. Sadly, but not untypically, all record of her disappears after her marriage to an Italian singer. Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s (1805-1847) story is not dissimilar – despite being a child prodigy alongside her brother Felix, their father discouraged any ambition for Fanny as a composer, and once married, although she continued to compose in private, it was only after her death that her work began to be published. Here, Cahill plays two of her Vier Lieder, the rippling and poignantly expressive No. 1, with its turbulent, swirling left hand, and the gently throbbing No. 3, Cahill delivering the yearning melody with great lyricism here. Space won’t allow for discussion of all the pieces here, so I must focus on highlights, such as the turbulent waves around a constant chugging rhythm in Venezuelan composer Teresa Carreño’s (1853-1917) ‘Un rêve en mer’, or the brightly evocative bird song over dark chords in Fannie Dillon’s (1881-1947) ‘Birds at Dawn’. Agi Jambor’s (1909-1997) Piano Sonata: 'To the Victims of Auschwitz’ is unsurprisingly dark, with hammering repeated low octaves and nagging repetition, urgent driving rhythms, and then ghostly pianissimo tinkles at the top of the keyboard and a final deathly quiet chord to finish. Deirdre Gribbin (b.1967) explores the dark side of her adopted home of London in Unseen, with insistent, shaking urgency and dark, fearful undertones, before a moment of almost motionless calm. This is an impressive collection, with Cahill effortlessly traversing a phenomenal range of styles, even contributing her voice reciting a poem by Ruth Crawford Seeger in Eve Beglarian’s (b.1958)Fireside. Her exemplary performances here also serve to celebrate the variety of music composed by women over centuries excluded from the classical ‘canon’, and the next volume is eagerly awaited.
I very much enjoyed the first volume of violinist Kinga Ujszászi and harpsichordist Tom Foster’s exploration of the riches of an amazing archive from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the ‘Cabinet of Wonders’, and now they’re back with another volume of delights. The archive has miraculously survived all that time in Dresden, and is known as ‘Schrank II’ after the cabinet in which it was stored. This volume presents us with music by Martino Bitti (1655/56-1743), Henricus Albicastro (c.1660-1730), Carlo Fiorelli (c.1673-unknown), and two works of uncertain origin, but possibly attributable to Girolamo Laurenti (1678-1751) and Antonio Montanari (1676-1737). I have to confess only the last of these names was at all familiar to me, but there is some delightful and inventive music on offer here. Bitti’s ‘Dresden’ Sonatas (of which three are performed here) have delicate grace and lively, bouncy faster movements. There are harmonically relatively conventional, but Bitti explores the higher register of the violin to great effect in the second Allegro of the Sonata No. 4. There are some slightly more interesting harmonic shifts in No. 1’s middle movement, which dances along nicely, and there is great rapid interplay between violin and harpsichord, a 10th apart, in the opening movement. No.5’s final Gigue is lively, with the harpsichord trilling like a strumming guitar. Albicastro’s offering has a mournfully lyrical opening, as well as rapid figuration and imitation between the instruments in the middle movement. The Laurenti is perhaps the most overtly virtuosic for the violin, but it is the Montanari that stands out for me, with its sliding chromatic lines, frequent tempo changes, and delicate joint figurations from the two instruments. Ujszászi’s virtuosity is without doubt, but she is also alive to the more lyrical and expressive moments, and brings a graceful lightness to even the more conventional passages. There is clear unanimity between Ujszászi and Foster throughout, whether when imitating one another, or when in rapid runs together as in the Bitti. Given there are around 1750 works in ‘Schrank II’, I think we can confidently expect more volumes from these two talented players.
The Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Joanna MacGregor present Silent Classics, with Neil Brand (pianist, film historian & composer), with live music performed to the Buster Keaton classic One Week, and Oliver Twist, starring Jackie Coogan & Lon Chaney (2.45pm, Sunday 6 March, Brighton Dome). They return later in the month for Elgar, Mozart and Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1, with Joanna MacGregor now on the piano, and Sian Edwards conducting (2.45, Sunday 27 March, Brighton Dome).
Worthing Symphony Orchestra perform Mainly Mozart, including the Concerto for flute and harp (with soloists Monica McCarron & Elizabeth Green), the Piano Concerto No. 6 with Jeneba Kanneh-Mason (piano) and Elgar & Haydn also on the programme (2.45pm, Sunday 13 March, Assembly Hall, Worthing).
Brighton Early Music Festival celebrates Early Music Day with a concert of Renaissance Music on a Grand Scale, including Brumel’s ‘Earthquake’ Mass, and music by Robert Carver, performed by the BREMF Consort of Voices and members of the English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble, conducted by Deborah Roberts (7.30pm, Sunday 20 March, St Martin’s Church, Brighton).
(Edited versions of these reviews first appeared atScene, March 2022)
To
mark International Women’s Day (8 March 2017), I am featuring a new recording of 16th
century motets, probably written by Lucrezia Borgia’s daughter, Suor Leonora d’Este (1515-1575). Why?
Well, this release is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it brings to our ears some beautiful
music long forgotten, but as importantly, it explores the position of women in
sixteenth century music in several ways – women as composers and as performers,
but also the significance of convents as places of music. This recording will be a focus for BBC Radio 3’s
Composer of the Week programme on IWD, as it clearly has national, even
international significance. But there’s
also a local dimension. Deborah Roberts, Co-director of
Brighton Early Music Festival is a founder member of Musica Secreta, the group performing on this disc, and the Celestial Sirens who also perform here
draw on some of the best amateur female voices across the south. Fellow Musica Secreta founder Laurie Stras, who was behind the
research that brought this music to light, and Deborah talked to me about the
recording and what it means for them, and for women in music in general.
Musica Secreta
Tell us a bit about Musica Secreta, and how this
recording came about?
LS: Deborah
Roberts and I started the group in 1990 to investigate music written for female
musicians in the late sixteenth century – we officially joined forces in 1999
for a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board.This is the fourth recording we’ve made
together.
DR: We founded the
choir Celestial Sirens more than 10 years ago and it’s made up of female voices
from the whole South coast region with a lot of Brighton members. Both groups
have performed regularly at Brighton Early Music Festival, and will be again
this year.
Celestial Sirens
So how did you first come across the music of Suor
Leonora – who was she?
LS: As all good
research finds are, this one was down to serendipity. I was leafing through a catalogue of
sixteenth-century prints, and a motet title just leapt out at me: 'Salve sponsa
Dei,' which means 'Hail, Bride of God.' It seemed like an obvious candidate for a nun’s text, so I ordered a
reproduction of the book from the library in Germany that has the only complete
copy.
Leonora d’Este
was the only surviving daughter of Lucrezia Borgia and Duke Alfonso I of
Ferrara. She was only four when her
mother died, and she was raised in the convent of Corpus Domini in
Ferrara. She became its abbess when she
was only eighteen. She was admired as a
musician by some of century’s greatest musical minds, and even inspired one of
them, Gioseffo Zarlino, to write his last great treatise.
There’s nothing
in the book to say that the motets are by Suor Leonora: in fact, the entire
book is anonymous. But completely
anonymous music books, particularly at this point in history, are extremely
rare – the only other ones we know about were, in fact, books of music written
by noblemen, like Carlo Gesualdo, who did not wish to be seen to be doing
something as common as entering the marketplace. It’s only through really close musical and
textual analysis that I’ve been able to piece together evidence that points to
her as the composer.
Laurie Stras
And what makes her music so special, do you think?
LS: The music is
just startlingly beautiful, and very different to what you might expect. The most obvious feature is what I’ve called
her radical attitude to dissonance – while most early sixteenth-century music
is bound by rules that forbid harsh dissonances and ensures that even mild
dissonance is used only sparely, the motets in this book just don’t. Of course, having five voices singing more or
less continuously all in the same range, it’s hard to avoid some dissonance,
but our composer here just revels in juicy clashes and unusual cadences. On there other hand, there are also a number
of pieces in which all five voices swirl around the same pitches in a hypnotic
way – it’s a bit like what you’d expect of a sixteenth-century John Tavener.
Deborah Roberts
What can this tell us about women and music in the
16th century?
DR: That women
were deeply involved in making music and composing and probably there is an
awful lot of music composed by women that simply never survived.
LS: If I could do
just one thing for the way we understand the history of music, it would be to
bring women’s polyphony back into the frame.
The cities of Europe relied on their convents – not just for their
spiritual health, but for many economic functions – and one of the ways a
convent could become prosperous was through its music. Ordinary citizens couldn’t hear the music of
the great court chapels: the sound of the convents was the sound of the Renaissance
city. Large cities had dozens of convents, and even if they couldn’t see the
nuns, ordinary citizens could enjoy their music through listening from the
outer church.
Why is it important to keep exploring music by women
from so long ago – surely if it’s so good, we’d know about it?
DR: Ha! I think
not. History I’m afraid has largely been
HIS story. The evidence has always been there but never made it to the history
books until recently. Now quite a few researchers have been delving into archives
and discovering so much. One of these researchers, Craig Monson, published a
book a few years ago called Disembodied Voices. It tells the story of a nun
composer, Lucrezia Vizzana who spent her whole life, from the age of 8, in a
Bolognese convent. The story is quite hair-raising (and all true!). It tells of
convent riots, relationships between the women themselves, power struggles
etc.., but also just how important music was to these women and how far they
would go to preserve the right to perform.
LS: Well, didn’t
Virginia Woolf say, 'Anonymous was a woman'? There are two things at play
here. First, anonymous music is often
passed over for exactly the reason you say: 'if it’s so good, surely someone
would want to claim it'? Well, no:
Leonora d’Este, for instance, had three good reasons not to put her name to
published music – she was a nun, she was a woman, and she was a princess. Second, it is a sad but pretty consistent
fact that even if women are recognised during their lifetimes as excellent
musicians, they do not make it into the grand narrative: hence the brouhaha
over the A level syllabus last year, spearheaded by a courageous young woman;
hence the popularity of the International Women’s Day programming on BBC Radio
3.
Was it important for this recording that all the
performers were women? Did it make a
difference to the process?
LS: Since this
music was so very different to the sort of polyphony we are used to, we had to
find a new way to work with it: so in the summer of 2015 we retreated to a barn
in Sussex to spend a couple of days living and singing together, relaxing
rather than wondering if the train would be late on the way home. This worked so well that we decided to make
the recording this way: we recorded the CD last August in the chapel of the
Cuddesdon Sisters. We ate our meals with
them, and stayed in their new accommodation block. We did bring our own prosecco, though…
And where next – is there music by women out there
still to be discovered?
LS: Oh, I’m sure
there is: and there is loads more convent music that needs exploring. Our next
project may even take us back further into the fifteenth century, to the
beginnings of convent polyphony in the Renaissance.
DR: The main
thing I would add to this is that it’s not just music BY women, but what we are
doing is opening up a massive repertoire of music from as early as the 15th
century onwards that was always assumed to be originally performed by all male
choirs. Laurie’s research is discovering clear evidence that choirs of women in
convents performed virtually all of this music.
That anything which can be performed by all male ensembles is equally
valid (and historically appropriate) for women’s voices!
And so to the
recording. The sixteen pieces here vary
from short gems such as Veni sponsa
Christi, sung by the full combined forces of Musica Secreta and the
Celestial Sirens, to the centrepiece, the fabulous Angelus Domini descendit, sung by just four voices from Musica
Secreta, accompanied as on most of the disc by Claire Williams on organ and
Alison Kinder on bass viol. Many of the
Musica Secreta pieces are sung with two voices to a part, with a perfectly
blended sound, creating that hypnotic effect that Laurie mentions. However, in the pieces for solo voices, such
as Angelus Domini and Ego sum panis vitae, a much more
intimate sound is created, making the dissonances here even more striking, and
the individuality of solo voices is allowed to come through. As Laurie explains in the informative liner
notes, they followed techniques that 16th century nuns would have
used, with some transposition to match voice ranges, so that further variety is
created, from the souring, crystal high soprano line of Sicut lilium inter spinas, to a deliciously fruity low alto/tenor
line in Iste est Joannes. By any
measure, this is striking music, and you couldn’t ask for more committed and
expert performances. Highly recommended.
