The Gesualdo Six release their eleventh album for Hyperion, Wishing Tree, described by the group’s director, Owain Park, as “a journey through time, poetry, and song, rooted in tradition yet alive with contemporary expression”.
Taking its title from Joby Talbot’s vivid 2002 work The wishing tree, the album explores themes of nature, memory, longing and play, moving between Renaissance madrigals, folk-song arrangements and contemporary choral works.The programme opens with William Byrd’s This sweet and merry month of May, one of the few pieces by Byrd that might rightly be called a madrigal, before travelling through English, Irish and Scottish folk traditions in arrangements including Bushes and briars, The oak and the ash, The lark in the clear air, My love is like a red, red rose and My bonny lies over the ocean.
At the heart of the album is Talbot’s The wishing tree, a punchy and angular setting of Kathleen Jamie’s poem, in which syllables are passed between voices over an irregular rhythmic ostinato, capturing what Talbot describes as a sense of “perpetual yearning”.
The recording also features music by David Bednall, Alison Willis, Christen Taylor Holmes, Owain Park, Josquin, Arcadelt, Gibbons, Stanford and Poulenc, creating a richly atmospheric journey through birdsong, wind, rain, childhood memory and the enduring pull of home.The programme will be performed at Wigmore Hall on 13 July, followed by an appearance at Ryedale Festival.
The album can be purchased on The Gesualdo Six and Hyperion Records' websites respectively.
Listen here: https://hyperion.lnk.to/CDA68480
