Renaissance Moderns
Britten Sinfonia, Marian Consort, Lisa Illea
Milton Court, London. 11 May 2024

Binchois (arr. for strings by Lisa Illean): Two chansons
Dunstable: Regina Caeli
Thomas Adès: Darknesse visible
Lisa Illean: Arcing, stilling, bending, gathering (UK premiere)
Lusitano: Heu me Domine; Allor che ignuda
Gesualdo: Moro lasso; Hei mihi Domine; Sparge la more
Brett Dean: Carlo

This cleverly designed concert from the Britten Sinfonia and The Marian Consort was built around the music of Gesualdo and his influence on present-day composers, notably the Australian composer Lisa Illean whose compositions were a feature of the evening, including the European premiere of her Arcing, stilling, bending, gathering, a co-commission of the Britten Sinfonia.

There aren’t many concerts where the programme has a content warning “contains references to violence, murder and rape”. This one did, in reference to the pre-concert showing of Werner Herzog’s 1995 German television film “Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices“. It was a rather curiously stylised and imaginative depiction of the life of Gesualdo (1566-1613), shot in the locations in which his life unfolded including the Palazzo San Severo in Naples, where the famous double murder of his wife, Donna Maria d’Avalos, and her lover took place (shortly before he succeeded as Prince of Venosa), and one of the family estates, the Castello di Gesualdo, where he spent most of the rest of his life in a state of declining mental health, employing a servant to apply daily flogings.

The concert opened with the early 15th-century English and French forerunners of the style that eventually led to Gesualdo with Lisa Illean’s beautifully delicate arrangements for strings of Binchois’ chansons Amours merchi and, later, Adieu, adieu, and the Regina Caeli by Dunstaple sung by three singers of The Marian Consort. Huw Watkins then played Thomas Adès’ 1992 Darknesse Visible, an adaptation for piano of John Dowland’s In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell. Sequences of trills, some so high in the piano’s range that they were little more than a mechanical rattle, were punctuated by sudden loud interjections and chordal passages

Then came the European premiere of Lisa Illean’s evocative Arcing, Stilling, Bending, Gathering, a 19-minute four-movement piece for 12 strings, piano and pre-recorded sounds (controlled here by Sound Intermedia). It is based on four unrelated episodes and impressions gathered between 2012 and 2022. The shimmering and almost timeless sounds, which only occasionally build volume and texture, were musically based on the opening bars of the final section. Lisa Illean writes that this piece is “a very personal contemplation of the moments of kinship and tenderness that balance the immensity of the world we inhabit”. A YouTube video of a performance can be viewed here.

The second half opened with The Marian Consort and music by Gesualdo and Vicente Lusitano (c1520-c1561), a largely neglected Portuguese composer and theorist of probable half-African descent who is generally reckoned to be the first Black composer to have his music published. A Guardian article by Joe McHardy can be read here and my review of the Chineke! Voices’ Lusitano concert it refers to is here. The opening chromatically intense Heu me Domine, from Lusitano’s c1551 Tratado de canto de organo, is closely linked to his writings on counterpoint, polyphony and improvisation and reflect a more intellectually based approach to chromaticism than that of Gesualdo. The three-voice pastoral madrigal Allor che ignuda was a more traditional example of that imitative counterpoint that Lusitano championed.

The three Gesualdo pieces that followed, Moro lasso; Hei mihi Domine; and Sparge la more, reflected musical and emotional inspirations excellently described in the programme note by Rory McCleery, Artistic Director of The Marian Consort, and in his on-stage introduction to the sequence. The Marian Consort are one of the finest small-scale vocal groups around, and the performance of this complex music was exemplary. They sing with outstanding purity of tone and vocal texture, their commendable lack of vibrato bringing essential clarity to the complex lines of Lusitano and Gesualdo’s music.

The concert ended with Brett Dean’s 1997 Carlo for string orchestra, sampler and tape, a piece dedicated to Gesualdo’s life and music. An opening recording of Gesualdo’s Moro Lasso dissolved into a kaleidoscope of colours and textures from the strings of the Britten Sinfonia and pre-recorded sounds. Like the rest of the contemporary music in this concert, as a specialist in early music, this was way out of my usual reviewing comfort zone so I will not offer any insights into the performance of the instrumentalists or the composers. But I was impressed with their involvement in the music throughout the evening, much of it seemingly tricky to play. Conductor William Cole managed, as far as I could tell, to keep the whole thing together with clear direction.