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.
For their Spitalfields Festival debut, The Marian Consort brought their programme ‘Christmas with the Shepherds’ (based on last year’s CD release) to St Leonard’s, Shoreditch at the conclusion of a national tour. In a very well conceived and planned programme, they traced the influence of Jean Mouton on composers of the following century, notably Cristóbel de Morales, whose Missa Quaeramus cum pastoribus formed the nucleus of the programme. After the opening motet Alma Redemptoris Mater by Victoria, the latest of the composers represented, we heard Mouton’s motet Quaeramus cum pastoribus, a work that stayed in the repertoire of the Sistine Chapel for more than 100 years and survives in 27 manuscripts and printed sources now to be found as far apart as Aberdeen and Guatemala. It is the best known of a series of ‘Noë’ motets found in the Sistine Chapel archive, the result of the Medici Pope Leo X whose after-dinner entertainment 
There is a current trend of building CD and concert programmes on collections of pieces made by others, one example being the Marian Consort & Rose Consort of Viols CD ‘An Emerald in a Work of Gold’. The music was drawn from the Robert Dow partbooks, copied in the mid-1580s and now housed in the library of Christ Church, Oxford. As well as being a major source of music of the period (with 134 pieces), Dow’s manuscripts are fine examples of musical calligraphy. The music is indicated as being suitable for voices and viols, so the pairing of the Marian Consort and the Rose Consort is appropriate, the latter providing accompaniment for five solo songs as well as instrumental solos. 
Andrew Benson-Wilson : Early Music Reviews + 