EXAUDI

The Mirror of Speculation

Between 1370 and 1420, a style of composition flourished in Europe of unprecedented brilliance, complexity and strangeness. Composers around the courts of Northern Italy and Southern France delighted in exploring the limits of musical possibility – rhythmic, harmonic, polyphonic – experimenting with dizzying arithmetical forms and bizarre notations: music written in the shape of a harp, or a heart, or in concentric circles in different colours of ink.

In this programme, we create a Hall of Mirrors reflecting ancient and modern back on each other until medieval and contemporary seem to merge. From the Ars subtilior repertoire, Ciconia’s puzzle-canon Le ray au soleyl is ‘solved’ in a multitude of ways; Senleches’ famous La harpe de mellodie is performed both with and without its canonic triplum; and Rodericus’ notoriously hermetic Angelorum psalat is presented in competing notations and turned into a musical uroboros, eating its own tail. Machaut’s lilting lovesongs are interleaved with Evan Johnson’s delicate treatment of Petrarch, and then filtered through a work by John Cage in James Weeks’ Four Virelais.

At the heart of the programme is a brand-new work by composer Mark Dyer. Dyer trained a computer to ‘learn’ the notation of the English Old Hall manuscript, dating from c.1415, using machine learning, and to produce new facsimilies which Dyer transcribed. The resulting compositions are presented alongside Old Hall works .

Chromatic Renaissance

Gesualdo’s fervid, harmonically daring music is relatively well-known today, but few people are aware of the decades of research into the chromatic and microtonal possibilities of music that preceded his work. Around 1550, nearly half a century before Gesualdo was writing, composer-theorists such Vicentino propounded intricate and sometimes outlandish views on the origins of harmony in Ancient Greek music, leading to the latter’s extraordinary microtonal madrigals as well as a wealth of highly chromatic works by composers including Rore, Lasso, Luzzaschi and Marenzio. This ‘researched’ music was highly prized for its sophistication by ambitious princes, and on one level can be seen as a sort of hothouse ‘musica reservata’ – a music reserved for the appreciation of the true cognoscenti – but should also be seen in the context of a more wide-ranging project of progressive composers at the time to dig deeper into music’s expressive possibilities and intensify the listener’s emotional response, whether a prince or not.

This music is little-known and scarce performed today, but is fascinating, beautiful and as strange to modern ears as to 16^th-century ones.

Book of Flames and Shadows

Book of Flames and Shadows is a continuous sequence of music lasting about an hour, incorporating two pieces by James Weeks (*1978) and madrigals by Jacques Arcadelt (1507-68). Its theme is the discovering, or awakening, of the sensual and erotic power of the spoken word, and its transformation into song, through the love poetry of Petrarch (1304-74) and his later imitators, including Pietro Bembo (1470-1547). A music of beginnings, of brief glances and tentative flowerings, planted in Italian Renaissance soil: looking back to the reticent, emerging expressivity of the earliest madrigals, to the attuning of lyric poetry to vocal sound in Petrarch, and to the way these new-old powers enable the artist to trace with more electric precision the contours of desire.

Gesualdo: Cruel Ecstacy

The later madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, exert a strange and enduring fascination on the modern musical imagination. Listening today to these extraordinary messages of anguish and ecstasy, we are drawn back to his flame like lovers who can’t let go, into the warp of chromatic harmony, the emotional hyper-intensity and mysterious otherness of this most tantalising early Baroque figure. Gesualdo: Cruel Ecstasy showcases EXAUDI’s revelatory performances of this music as well as their pre-eminence in contemporary repertoire, placing alongside the Gesualdos a selection of recent commissions, including selections from cycles by Finnissy and Fox.

Laws of Love: Marenzio and Petrach

The encounter between Luca Marenzio, one of the greatest Italian madrigalists, and the poetry of Francesco Petrarca is one of most extraordinary moments in Renaissance music. Though he had set Petrarca throughout his short career, it was in his final collections of six- and five-voice madrigals that Marenzio’s imagination caught fire. Petrarca’s Canzionere is an exploration of the poet’s feelings towards a distant beloved, Laura, both before and after her death; Marenzio focuses on the latter, creating a unique and complex style in which passionate intensity burns under a surface of resignation and grief, strangely wandering chromatic formations interspersed with ardent cries of yearning.

Laws of Love showcases the greatest of these madrigals, but begins in sunnier mood with settings of Petrarca’s more joyful poems, brilliantly illuminated by Marenzio in his lightest vein. In between, taking us across the river from Life to Death, a new work from British composer Naomi Pinnock outlines an obscure, unknown landscape.

Che augellin che canta

Quel augellin che canta is a brilliant and virtuosic exploration of the natural world in the classical and modern repertoire of Italian madrigals. Nature, its birds, animals, flowers and landscapes, is the quintessential setting for countless Renaissance love lyrics. Waves murmur, beasts gambol, birds take wing and breezes blow: the song of birds presages Spring or forms an ironic, innocent contrast to a poet’s tortured feelings. He wanders landscapes blooming with flowers and verdant grasses, or rocky outcrops and deserted shores. This programme brings together some of the essential nature-themed madrigals from 16^th-century Italy, including works by Wert, Marenzio and Monteverdi. Alongside this we perform the astonishing 12 Madrigali by Salvatore Sciarrino, designed as a modern response to this earlier repertoire. Sciarrino’s pieces go even further in imitating the sounds of the natural world, taking off from the brief haiku of Bashō which form their texts: cicadas, larks, glistening seas and wind-burnished autumn sunsets are dazzlingly portrayed in this compositional and vocal tour-de-force.