Three Early 17th Century Projects

Program: #24-28   Air Date: Jul 08, 2024

I. 17th Century Playlist (Theatre of the Ayre/Ed Lyon, t.). Delphian DCD34220.

From Presto Music:

Interview, Ed Lyon on his 17th-Century Playlist

by Katherine Cooper

The English tenor Ed Lyon has an impressive string of oratorio and opera recordings to his name, but has bided his time before making his debut solo album; released tomorrow on Delphian, 17th Century Playlist sees him joining forces with Theatre of the Ayre (featuring lutenist and theorbist Liz Kenny, whom David interviewed earlier this summer) for a programme of mostly unfamiliar but often irresistibly catchy songs by composers including Landi, Dowland, Guédron and Cavalli. We met up in London towards the end of the summer to talk about why he thinks there’s ‘nothing quite as sexy as baroque music’, the parallels between seventeenth-century songs and pop, and how the album reflects current listening trends.

You have quite a substantial discography in oratorio, but this is your first solo album: how did it come about?

In December 2017 I was at home recovering from a spine operation and had a lot of time to reflect on the business of singing, and it occurred to me how little making singers actually get to do in their careers. That isn’t a criticism, it’s just a statement of fact - particularly if you’re not one of the people who is on the recital-circuit, which I’m not (I’ve sung one recital in my entire life!). In most opera productions there’s somebody who tells you where to stand, somebody who tells you what to feel, somebody else who tells you what to say and how to pronounce it, somebody else tells you what speed it’s going to go, and yet another person who tells you what you’re going to wear. I’ve always had quite a strong desire to make things from scratch, but that’s generally been channelled into hobbies and outside interests: I’m quite into painting and calligraphy, and do illuminated manuscripts of my own as an outlet for that urge to create. So there I was sitting at home in Cheltenham and I thought: ‘What is it that I want to make?’. And that took me back to my abiding love of baroque music, which is still my go-to listen; I’ve always had quite a varied repertoire, but I just hit forty which is a bit of a turning-point vocally, so I thought it was a good opportunity to explore some of the earlier stuff that I’d always wanted to do but never got the chance; I’ve loved the Landi songs which are on the album for ten years. 

I figured that almost everything on the album would be new to almost everybody, except the Dowland and perhaps Lambert’s Vos mépris chaque jour. The music really does rely on me and this band to bring it to life, and it’s so exciting to think that a lot of people will be hearing these songs for the first time, sung and performed by us. It’s very different from doing a mainstream album of songs or arias and being compared to Bostridge or Langridge, or even legends like Caruso or Pavarotti. 

Had you worked with this particular band before?

The continuo team for the album is pretty much the same line-up that we had for L’Ormindo at the Globe in 2015, which was an incredibly rewarding experience for me: I grew up wanting to be an actor before I got into music, and in L’Ormindo I found the perfect synthesis of those things. It was one of the first times that I felt liberated as an actor, because there was no conductor and no monitors: essentially, the musicians just had to listen and to know the score really well, and they responded absolutely brilliantly.

A lot of the songs on the album seem to have a great deal in common with contemporary pop ballads, despite being written several centuries ago...

It was never about creating crossover, because I don’t believe in crossover: it was more about saying ‘You don’t need something to be crossover for it to have crossover appeal’. I think these songs are so joyful and easy to connect with: they’re genuinely catchy, memorable and easy to listen to, even if you’ve never heard them before. The average length is about three-and-a-half minutes, and it struck me how much that ties into the modern songs we all listen to and the expectations we bring to them – we expect things to be a certain length, to have verses, to include a catchy refrain, that kind of thing, and so many of these airs du cour fit the bill so perfectly even though they're unfamiliar to most people.

One of the things which struck me when I first listened to the ‘Playlist’ was the surprising modernity of not only the individual songs but also the whole sweep of the album…

A lot of those songs are literally on a playlist that I have on my iPhone, and it occurred to me that that’s how a lot of people like to listen to things today; we singers are conditioned to think about recital-work, to come up with really ingenious themes and ways of organising programmes, but I don’t believe that most people sit down to listen to a whole album any more. I hesitate to think of it as ‘background music’, but people no longer listen with their full attention all the time and I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. What I love about this album is that you can experience it in whatever way you choose: you can listen carefully with the texts in front of you, or you can dip in and out of it as the mood takes you.

You’ve chosen to style the album as a ‘playlist’ - would it work on shuffle?

Yes, I think it would, because there’s nothing prepped and classical about it at all. But at the same time it’s not not-structured – there are all sort of ideas running through the programme, as I realised once I started to think about potential titles. I didn’t want to call it 17th-Century Love-Songs, which seemed a bit generic, but at one point I did think about calling it Songs for Celia, as her name seems to crop up all the time in these songs! It’s interesting that you ask, because the order that’s on the album isn’t actually the one I initially chose. I sent Paul Baxter [the managing director at Delphian] what was essentially a recital-order, so it was quite beautifully balanced: I’d organised it so that there was a real sequence of keys and no jarring changes of tonality, and it had a nice journey that ended on a high note, so it ticked all the recital boxes. Paul shuffled it round quite a lot and I’m so glad he did, because there are now moments where it does change gear, but it’s kind of a refresh for the listener - and it also ends on the Canta la cicaletta, which is our theorbo-player Liz Kenny’s favourite! Having that as the final track will hopefully invite the listener to leave the album running so that it starts again from the beginning; I’d originally envisaged a big finish (I went with Landi's Damigella tutta bella as the closing track), but that doesn’t work so well as a circular programme. 

Is any of the music actually improvised?

Yes, and one of the things that I love about the album is that it has a slightly folky aspect to it: very little is written down and preserved in aspic. Apart from the two ritornelli that were written out (Damigella and the excerpt from Cavalli's Eliogabalo), all of the violin stuff was improvised, and of course everything 

that the continuo team do was also essentially improvised, because that’s just how they work. One of the reasons I wanted to start with the aria from Eliogabalo was because that’s the one that’s the most set down, and everything kind of disintegrates from there, up to a point; I love people like Christina Pluhar, but I didn’t want to get into that space where we have a clarinet jazzing away in a baroque aria!

That said, we found it quite hard to avoid being just a bit Celine Dion here and there, and for one of the tracks (Passacaglia delle vita) I asked the continuo team if we could really channel Buena Vista Social Club! I’m quite evangelistic about the Landi songs, and my favourite track on the album is Je voudrais bien Chloris: the whole scenario there is so modern (it’s essentially about a man getting up and leaving a woman after they've just had sex!), and the musical language really chimes in with that too. If you listen to French pop songs very carefully, you can hear French baroque ornaments in there even today: they fit so well with the French language, and that’s why you get whispers of Celine Dion in this music that pre-dates her by 400 years!

The album has a certain timeless appeal, but how concerned were you with historically-informed performance-practice when you were putting it together?

Snobbery is still a huge issue in early music, so I enlisted Liz Kenny to act as the Taste Police for the recording: if something was bad taste but I liked it, then we kept it; if it was objectively wrong, then Liz would veto it. It was just great to have somebody there with the authority to say ‘Sorry, you can’t start a trill from the leading-note in English music’, but what I love about Liz is that she’s never dogmatic about things. I also picked violinists who were not too hessian about vibrato, because there are a lot of fabulous string-players out there who will refer you back to some treatise that was written in the seventeenth century and refuse to use it at all. But if something sounds better with vibrato than it does without, I honestly don’t believe that musicians at the time would have said ‘Sorry, we can’t do that because it’s 1610!’. 

Given all the unexpected modernity of a lot of the music, would you consider performing the programme in unconventional venues such as clubs and pubs?

I’m desperate to do that, and I’m chasing various opportunities to make it happen: the only real caveat is that the music needs venues with a decent acoustic that has a bit of bloom, because otherwise these early instruments can lack warmth. There’s this misconception that early music isn’t accessible, but I think this stuff is so much more accessible than even a Mozart symphony: after all, a lot of these tracks are three-and-a-half minute songs with verses and a refrain and somebody strumming a guitar!

II. Cantate Violini! Florid Early Baroque Songs and Polyphony (Les Sonadori/Anne Delafosse, s./Pascale Boquet, v.). Pasacaille CD 1056.

The most beautiful polyphonic canzoni, chansons, motets and madrigals, were used like today’s pop standards in the 16th century; musicians would improvise on them, tailoring their playing and imagination to each other.

The colourful and varied selection of works on this recording is made up of different combinations of voices and instruments. A special aspect, a kind of renaissance violin band stands at the centre of this project: ensembles of violins were generally used to accompany certain moments in the Mass, at banquets, receptions, princely entertainments, entries into cities and palaces, diplomatic negotiations and sacred and secular processions as well as the long hours of dancing that followed the evening meal.

This all took place in northern Italy from the 1530s onwards, until the 1580s and 1590s announced the arrival of the new baroque style. The word Sonadori, the name of the ensemble, is Venetian in origin; the Scuole Grandi or confraternities there employed full-time ensembles of singers and musicians. The confraternity of San Rocco was the first to replace the older instruments such as the fiddle, harp and lute with sonadori nuovi – new players – of the violin in 1531.

Les Sonadori:

• Béatrice Linon (treble violin)
• Odile Edouard (treble violin, small alto violin)
• Nicolas Sansarlat (alto violin)
• Alain Gervreau (tenor violin)
• Sarah Van Oudenhove (small bass violin)
• Hervé Douchy (bass violin)

III. Infinite Refrain: Music of Love’s Refuge (Randall Scooting, ct./Jorge Navarro Colorado, t./Academy of Ancient Music/Laurence Cummings). Signum CD SIGCD769.

The first of its kind, this duet album is a musical journey that draws back the curtain which has obscured gay love-stories for centuries. In the 17th century, Venice offered a liberal safe haven of sorts to the gay community of greater Europe. There are accounts of outed artists escaping to Venice to live and work amongst its more permissive culture. Almost 400 years later, we reconnect with this uncommonly tolerant place and time to share a history that is yet untold.

The album includes vivid and charming duets from Monteverdi’s 7th book of madrigals as well as his touching musical love letters (lettere amorose). Additionally, there are four modern-day premieres of works by the little-known composers Boretti, Melani, and Castrovillari; including a moving duet for the lovers Hercules and Theseus as they exit the underworld hand-in-hand. Solo arias by Cavalli and Stradella depict the yearning of hidden love, and the recording culminates with one of the most beautiful duets of all time, ‘Pur ti miro’ from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea. This album is a recognition and celebration of gay love that spans the centuries.

From Opera News:

American Randall Scotting has made a name for himself both as an authority on Italian Baroque music and as one of its most exquisitely timbered interpreters. The countertenor has in the past year alone released two albums, “The Crown” and “Lovesick,” a 17th century anthology about loss and heartbreak.

With “Infinite Refrain: Music of Love’s Refuge” he joins forces with tenor Jorge Navarro Colorado to explore facets of gay romance in Venice’s early period of Enlightenment. The album was published by Signum Classics and is conducted by Laurence Cummings at the helm of the Academy of Ancient Music.

Forbidden Love

As is by now customary for his releases, the track list sports a mix of rather familiar arias, duets, as well as complete unknowns, the preparation of which, to Scotting, is an archeological labor of love.

There is, for instance, a hauntingly intimate rendition of Monteverdi’s “Pur ti miro” which appears in fresh guise by being sung by two men instead of a countertenor and a soprano. The maestro from Cremona is most prominently represented, as nearly half of the album’s tracks bear his authorship.

In addition, his (near-)contemporaries Jacopo Melani, Tarquinio Merula, Daniele da Castrovillari, Francesco Cavalli, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Alessandro Stradella, and Giovanni Legrenzi are each included to form a wide ranging musical fresco of humanist Venice.

Among the four premiere recordings, the duet of “Entro l’orrida mole… Se per tè lieto mi lice” deserves special mention. Written by Giovanni Antonio Boretti, whose operas all premiered in the Venetian Republic, it is a strikingly beautiful declaration of same-sex love between Hercules and Theseus who make the mutual promise that “questa vita, o caro, è tua non mia,” “my life, oh beloved, belongs to you and not me.”

It may well be the CD’s most open proclamation of gay love.

“In genere rappresentativo”

With Scotting and Navarro Colorado the UK-based label has enrolled two experts in the Baroque repertory whose warmly timbered voices complement each other quite marvelously.

The duets are tenderly sung, full of emotional nuance yet in strict obedience to notational intricacies. For instance, the progression from Theseus’ bewilderment to his love confession in Boretti’s “Ercole in Tebe” is a sheer delight; control over the messa di voce allows both singers to cover the whole spectrum of psychological expression.

Individually, and on a technical level, the tracks may be less demanding than Scotting’s selection of arias for “The Crown” which were chosen to emulate the virtuosity of the legendary castrato Senesino. However, “Infinite Refrain” holds its own set of challenges as its emphasis lies on love, and a potentially forbidden one at that.

The fervent but no less introspective adoration of the “Lettere amorose,” for example, is hard to navigate. In the recitativo-like introduction to “Se i languidi miei sguardi” our countertenor relies on delicate chiaroscuro modulations to infuse the line with amorous sentiment.

Similarly, Navarro Colorado strikes the right balance in approaching the overwhelming directness of its counterpiece, “Se pur destina e vole.” The Mediterranean warmth of his tenor accords well with Monteverdi and Ottavio Rinuccini’s dramatic flight of ideas. After all, the “Lettere” are monodic compositions “in genere rappresentativo,” that is with a decidedly theatrical intent.

A Baroque Labor of Love

Two instrumental interludes, the “Ballo detto Pollicio” and the “Ballo del Granduca,” provide for some variation; the former was written by Tarquinio Merula who – the excellent booklet informs us – was charged with indecency, likely because of his sexual orientation.

They give credit to conductor Laurence Cummings and the Academy of Ancient Music whose connoisseurship of period-instruments and techniques transpires on every track.

In short, “Infinite Refrain” upholds Signum Classics’ commitment to the Baroque Age as it aligns with Scotting’s earlier releases on the British label. It showcases some little known but no less charming discoveries while pairing two of the repertoire’s most outstanding singers.