Tag Archives: Carolyn Sampson

In the Belly of the Beast

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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

Less is more. The truth underlying that paradox could so easily be applied to In the Belly of the Beast, a dramatic presentation by the Dunedin Consort (in collaboration with Mahogany Opera and Hera) that pulls together three Cantates Bibliques by the French Baroque composer Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, lasts around an hour, and employs merely two singers and three instrumentalists. Friday’s Glasgow performance was the penultimate in a tour that in recent weeks has taken in Edinburgh’s Assembly Roxy, the Aldeburgh Festival and Spitalfied Music Festival, ending last Saturday in Whitehaven.

A common thread are the Old Testament biblical heroes featured respectively in the three cantatas, each thrown into crisis in response to their relationships with God: Adam’s guilty disobedience; Jonah’s rebellious flight to sea; Jephthah’s foolish bargaining of his daughter’s life. And of course the music: three evocative cantatas by a composer who was exceptional for her time – the first woman composer to be performed at the Paris Opera and active during the late reign of Louis XIV. 

Where Friday’s performance especially succeeded was in revealing the wealth of imagery and emotion contained in De la Guerre’s music, especially with such minimal forces. It said much, too, of the three musicians – Liam Byrne (musical director and viola da gamba), Eric Thomas (theorbo) and Alice Earll (violin) – that they could collectively unleash an expressive range far greater than the visible sum of their parts. 

In that sense they were more than simply an effective engine room for a drama played out with sharp minimalist focus by sopranos Carolyn Sampson and Mariana Rodrigues, under the economic stage direction of Jennifer Fletcher. Sampson played a solo multi-character role in Adam, the highpoint of which was the hero’s expressive and expansive final aria acknowledging life’s brevity. At this point, and with Sampson’s soulful clarity, the exhilaration effected by De la Guerre’s evocative music made its mark.

Rodrigues’ take on Jonah offered an appropriately stormier appeal, a shriller, more animated delivery in tune with the maritime imagery, but nonetheless capable of darker reflection. Where the two sopranos came together in the opening duet to Jephthah – a moment of great rejoicing before the realisation of Jephthah’s promise to sacrifice his daughter in return for victory in battle – this production swung into overdrive. The vocal interaction was electrifying.

As a theatrical spectacle – aided by Ingrid Hu’s designs with lighting and projection by Ben Moon – simplicity and practicality were to the fore. Nothing much physically happened, but nor in the end did it need to. As ever with Dunedin, the performances were stylish and exceptional. Mention, too, is owed to Toria Banks, whose slick translations offered contemporary poetic relevance to the texts without devaluing a single note of De la Guerre’s exquisite music.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Andy Catlin)

Dunedin / Carolyn Sampson

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Perth Concert Hall

It was billed as ‘Carolyn Sampson sings Bach’, but that only happened at the end of the programme and perhaps undersold the rest of it, not least the remarkable modern work by Canadian composer Jocelyn Morlock which was the singer’s contribution to the first half.

Golden is the completion by Morlock of a piece begun by her late teacher Nikolai Korndorf. As she herself died in her early 50s last year, the work, based on an image of rebirth inspired by swimmers in a mineral pool in Manitoba, is doubly poignant. It is an extraordinary 10 minutes, beginning with percussive noises and breathy whispering (from the instrumentalists as well as Sampson) and growing through an incrementally developing strings part – with first violin Matthew Truscott to the fore – to a denouement in which the soprano’s wordless vocal was followed by her playing of two precisely tuned/filled wine glasses.

It was a world away from Bach’s cantata Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, except that virtuoso technique was required for both, from the singer and from trumpeter Paul Sharp, whose baroque instrument was her foil in the outer movements, the two soloists backed by the 14-piece ensemble of strings and keyboards.

The music in the middle, however, is very different: a lovely aria with spare continuo that showcased Sampson’s expressive voice, her precise articulation over her full range, and breath control that seemed effortless. Tellingly, she rarely consulted the score on the music stand in front of her.

The piece culminates in a glorious Alleluia aria that is not just a showpiece for the singer – although it is very much that – but also a wonderful eruption of ensemble sound.

The instrumental works on the programme, by Handel and Locatelli, were equally core repertoire for this outfit, and the current personnel seemed particularly well integrated. Truscott shared much of the direction with John Butt, and not only when the latter swapped places with Stephen Farr from harpsichord to chamber organ to be soloist on Handel’s Organ Concerto in B flat, HWV 290, playing the intricate top line that was a party piece for the composer himself. It was followed after the interval by a Concerto Grosso in which the Largo was a highlight with a lower strings and organ underscore gradually taken up by the violins.

The Locatelli was a perfect opener for the programme, Truscott making an early mark with his soloing and the whole band concluding the work with a perfectly poised last few bars. On this sort of form there is no debate that the Dunedin Consort is one of the finest Baroque ensembles in the world, and Sampson could hardly be heard in finer company with her own superb vocal instrument.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Leleux

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City Halls, Glasgow

A familiar presence at Scotland’s orchestral concerts into his 90s, Hedley Wright, who died last year, was also one of Scottish music’s great philanthropists, both in cash and in gifts for performers and promoters of the Springbank whisky produced in Campbeltown by the family firm.

Last week’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra concerts were dedicated to his memory and, as he sponsored the orchestra’s first oboe chair for many years, appropriately featured that instrument. French oboist Francois Leleux was conductor and soloist but it was the holder of that chair, Robin Williams, who had the first solo word in Mozart’s Symphony No 25, the G Minor work he wrote on his return to Salzburg from Vienna in 1773.

If, as has been suggested, the piece documents the teenage composer’s first heartbreak, Leleux certainly made the case for the symphony as an early Romantic work, but without sacrificing any of the SCO’s Classical precision.

Leleux’s own arrangements of arias from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute opened the second half of the concert, a delightful bit of bold appropriation of the music for his own instrument. The two Papageno songs in particular were treated in a theme-and-variations fashion, becoming show-off party-pieces for oboe – part juke box, part musical box.

The other soloist in the programme was soprano Carolyn Sampson, in absolutely unmatchable form on the Berlioz cantata Heminie. As theatrical as everything the French composer wrote, it provided the musical theme for his masterwork, the Symphonie Fantastique, but is fascinating in its own right. Setting text by poet and playwright Pierre-Ange Vieillard it is the monologue of the titular Muslin princess, in love with Christian crusader Tancredi, the enemy of her people – Romantic story-telling that ranges from dramatic exclamation to anguished prayer. Sampson’s delivery of the composer’s response to the words was masterly, at ease with abrupt changes in tempo and bold leaps across her range. The cantata has an exquisite musical arc too, and the linking of its discrete sections by Leleux and Sampson became persuasively more fluid as the work progressed.

That sense of narrative continuity was also present in Leleux’s account of Ravel’s Ma mere l’oye (Mother Goose) which brought the concert to an end. Ravel’s response to the fairytales of Charles Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy may be individually readable, with details like the clarinet as Beauty and contrabassoon as The Beast, but it is the use of the full range of instrumentation, including percussion details, harp and celeste, and solos from flute, piccolo and front desk strings, that make the orchestration of the whole work a compelling tale.

Leleux took a symphonic approach to the suite so that the full orchestral climax was a glorious finish to a very colourful, clever programme.

Keith Bruce

Three Bible Her-Stories

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Toria Banks, co-creator of concerts that rediscover a celebrated French composer, explains the Dunedin Consort’s latest programme to KEITH BRUCE

Incremental though change may often seem, the development in the breadth of repertoire concert-goers can now expect to hear is interestingly illustrated by the work recently undertaken by Edinburgh’s Dunedin Consort.

In this year’s Lammermuir Festival it is joined by soprano Nardus Williams for a concert of early music by women composers, two years after it brought to EIF the radical contemporary revision of Purcell by Errollyn Wallen, Dido’s Ghost. This from an ensemble whose reputation was founded on precision period readings of Handel and Bach.

The Dunedin is this week presenting a programme – in Findhorn, Glasgow and Edinburgh – that both excavates neglected repertoire by a woman composer from the early 18th century and premieres it in a brand new version.

Out of her Mouth is the umbrella title that has been given to three (of the 12) Biblical cantatas, mostly concerned with women in the scriptures, written by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, who was a lauded composer in the court of France’s Sun King, Louis XIV, but whose music is very rarely performed in the 21stcentury.

The project was the brainchild of writer and director Toria Banks, whose company Hera has worked with the Dunedin and Mahogany Opera, who co-produced Dido’s Ghost, to bring it to fruition.

“We’ve been going for five years,” Banks explains, “and we programme operas by women, both current and historical and neglected. We have commissioned new work and explored repertory that is not being performed enough. Mahogany supported the development of an earlier project of ours and then came in to co-produce this after working with Dunedin on Dido’s Ghost.”

She describes the Cantates Biblique as “storytelling pieces of theatre”, their message unlimited by historical context. The chamber group onstage – harpsichord, cello and theorbo continuo with a solo violin – may be playing early 18th century music, but the staging is up-to-date.

“The set and costumes are neither lavish nor period. They are Bible stories of Judith, Rachel and Susanne, but they are very relevant, so we are telling them in an abstracted time and space, rather than in pre-Christian Israel or 18th century France when they were written.

“The music is fantastic, but what attracted me to these specific pieces by Jacquet de la Guerre rather than others was the relevance of the stories.”

The texts were written by the composer’s celebrated contemporary Antoine Houdar de la Motte, whose theatrical successes include the French play of the Portuguese story of Ines de Castro, long before Jo Clifford’s Traverse Theatre version inspired James MacMillan’s debut opera.

“I’ve written the new English version of the text,” says Banks, clearly relishing the challenge. “The libretti are very nimble for the period. In the text – and in the music – there are subtle shifts of perspective, from an ironic, distanced and slightly cynical approach to the subject matter to really hearty-rending sincerity.

“And although I wanted to bring out the female perspective of the characters more, but for a man writing in early 18th century France, there’s a real sense of interesting, well-rounded women in them.

“The technical challenge was to express all this in contemporary-sounding English, but I’ve left in some archaic touches where it feels like the character is being self-mythologising. On the one hand it is creative writing and on the other it is solving a complex puzzle.”

The question remains as to why this careful archaeology was necessary for a composer who was a favourite at court and revered beyond her death.

“In general French Baroque music is under-performed in this country,” Banks points out, “but I do think she has been more forgotten because she’s a woman. She was celebrated in her lifetime and she keeps appearing in lists of France’s ‘great composers’ through the 18th century. It’s only really post-Revolution that she disappears.

“In her lifetime she was right in the thick of it and never marginalised. She was in at the start of the fashion for French cantatas as well as at the start of the sonata as a fashionable form for instrumental music. Sometimes people try to explain her disappearance because her only opera was not a success, but that was in 1694 when almost all operas were failing.

“There is a big difference between her music then and in 1707 when she wrote the Cantates Biblique. She was a lauded young talent, but by the time she wrote these she was in her 40s and they are her mature work, with details that come from a place of confidence.”

Two female singers of comparable experience, Carolyn Sampson and Anna Dennis will sing two of the three, Judith and Susanne, while Rachel is in the hands of the younger Alys Roberts, found through an open call designed to give an opportunity to a less experienced but exciting talent as part of the project.

The composer is known to have sung the cantatas herself, and her sister was also a singer, and Banks describes the work as a gift to performers. She is understandably keen to continue the work of reintroducing Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre to modern audiences and has three more of the Biblical cantatas in mind.

“The one I’d like to do that is not expressly about a woman is Adam, which tells the story of The Fall, but does so without mentioning Eve at all. It is sung by a woman, and pins the blame for mankind’s misfortune entirely on Adam.”

Dunedin Consort’s Out of her Mouth is at Universal Hall, Findhorn on Friday, Platform, Midland Street, Glasgow on Saturday and Edinburgh’s Assembly Roxy on Sunday. Performances start at 8pm.

Pictured: Soprano Alys Mererid Roberts