FIFTH SUMMER CONCERT

Very English!

By Andreas Linsenmann

True to style:  singers in Tudor dress

ROTTWEIL, 23 August - It was with a charming freshness that the English vocal ensemble from Leamington Spa acquainted some 300 visitors on Sunday evening to the fifth Summer Concert with English vocal music, the English choral tradition and, into the bargain, English fashion(!).  To the freshness of the music was added the freshness of the atmosphere, in that our visitors from the island sang in the inner courtyard of the Dominican museum.

We tend in everyday speech to say 'English' , but of course it should most of the time really be 'British', because our use of the term embraces Scotland, Wales and also the northern tip of the neighbouring island, i.e. it refers to all these primary dominions of Her Majesty the Queen.

However in the case of our Sunday guests the word 'British' would be altogether inappropriate, because they offered music from before 1603, when the English and Scottish crowns were united, until finally in 1707 the two countries were unified.

Yet above and beyond such dynastic subtleties it was nevertheless a very English evening.  For it told the tale - in the costumes for a start  - of that brilliant epoch that was the rise of England, and saw its economic as well as its cultural blossoming: the Tudor era. Thus the singers introduced themselves with a jolly little song by Henry VIII, so famous for the number of wives he got through, and then there was a bawdy song called 'The Hunt is Up', which latched on to that king's enormous sexual appetite: for with no ambiguity whatsoever the 'hunt' being embarked upon was not exactly directed at prey of the four-legged kind.

Love and friendship were the central themes taken up by pieces that were principally (although not exclusively) by such English composers as John Fa[r]mer, Thomas Ford and of course John Dowland.  Of the latter's lute songs, which are undoubtedly a genuinely English genre, the singers performed the wistful 'Come again'.  It was moving to hear the way in which they spanned a kind of dramatic curve of desire, uttered in the throes of passion, that is traced through the words 'to see, to hear, to touch, to kiss' up to the final wish 'to die'.

With their delightful liveliness these eight singers, male and female, gave full effect to the merry as well as the more subtle sides of the pieces. Their voices were trained without being arty, but with security of tone, harmonic progression and style. Appropriate English and German readings were artfully interspersed, and the singers conveyed a brief, colourful impression of the secular vocal music of the 16th century.

Our guests from the island did not stint on (English?) humour either. Thus they gave credible performances as soldiers sitting in an inn and complaining of empty pockets, while from verse to verse they became ever more drunk and finally incapable of singing.  Or in a final number, for lack of shawms to play on, they simply pinched their nostrils together and thereby substituted very convincingly for the squawky instruments.

The organisers had at first hesitated about holding this concert in the open air. There was indeed some disturbance from traffic noise, but the decision to perform outside is to be applauded:  how else, echoing their musical imitation of insects chirping in Josquin de Près' 'El Grillo', could a real live cricket have joined in?

Thanks to David Jones for this translation