A highlight of the 2019 Brighton Early Music Festival was vocal ensemble Voice's show, Hildegard Transfigured, a programme of music by and inspired by St Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), performed making expert use of the space of St Martin's, along with an atmospheric light show. Voice have now released a wonderful collection, Hildegard Portraits, containing much of the same repertoire, and some new additions too. The three singers (Emily Burn, Clemmie Franks & Victoria Couper) have been singing together since they were at school, and it shows - the effortless blend, despite their distinctive individual voices, and the precision of their combined ornamentation and sense of line is highly impressive, whether in the long, mellifluous lines of Hildegard's souring antiphons, or in the virtuosic rhythmic demands of the contemporary companion works on this disc. Spread across the recording are pieces from the suite that gives the disc its name, Hildegard Portraits, by Laura Moody (b.1978). The seven short movements actually set texts from Hildegard's letters, rather than from her devotional writings. So they explore more of a sense of who she was - a woman 'who lived and loved'. In Humility, Emily Burn's pure tone 'flies on the wind', in contrast to the spoken text in which Hildegard describes herself as 'a poor little woman'. Sermon is frankly quite scary, as the fervent tirade to the clerics of Cologne is delivered in gabbled fury, and the finale of the set, The Living Light, is a masterpiece of virtuosity, with its repetition, complex rhythms and hypnotic clashes. Elsewhere, each of the voices gets their own solo take on Hildegard, with Emily Burns ringing out above the soft drone in O virtus sapiente, Clemmie Franks' rich, fuller tone giving warmth to O orzchis ecclesia, and Victoria Couper's variety of bright tone and delicate ornamentation particularly effective in O mirum admirandum. In Tim Lea Young's (b.1975) Three Wings: pt 1, written for the trio (as were most of the contemporary compositions here), the three watery lines weave and shift, with the vocal range spread wide across the voices. Marcus Davidson's (b.1965) approach is a more speech-like setting of the texts, with the voices mostly together rhythmically, communicating the text particularly directly in Musical Harmony. And in Ivan Moody's (b.1964) O quam mirabilis, the singers get to explore a greater dynamic range, with some delicate quiet singing, as well as a climax of echoing hight parts ringing out over a steady lower line. Stevie Wishart has had a huge influence on these singers, as it was with her group Sinfonye that they first discovered the music of Hildegard when they were around 12 years old. So it is fitting that several works by her, some specifically arranged by Voice, appear here. The almost electronic, hocketed (where individual notes in a figure or line are split between voices) rhythms, combined with a soaring, high slow line in Aseruz trium vocum, and the multi-tracked spatial effects explored in O choruscans lux, as well as Wishart's arrangements of some of Hildegard's pieces, serve to show her influence, but also the range and virtuosity of this young ensemble. And they even get to explore folk and jazz timbres in Emily Levy's (b.1980) How sweetly you burn, with its opening plaintive callings, slides and bluesy turns, and the fade away on the text 'never fade'. Quite frankly, this is an astonishing display, both in terms of strong interpretations of Hildegard's evocative music, and as a demonstration of virtuosic vocal talent in the contemporary works - highly recommended! Various. 2022. Hildegard Portraits. Voice. Compact Disc. Somm Recordings SOMMCD 0652.
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