BREMF: Hildegard Transfigured 2 – Voice Trio

This concert had two elements, some sublime singing and a light show, which was disappointing and upset a significant number of the audience. It didn’t worry me too much because I was following the texts that I had downloaded beforehand. It would have been helpful if these texts and the titles of the songs had been displayed synchronised with the singing. Some of the flashing effects were uncomfortably like migraine distortions, such as have been proposed as triggers of Abbess Hildegard’s visions. She decorated her manuscripts with these complex images as she strove to write down the music she experienced.

I shall focus my remarks on the extraordinary singing, a mystical cantata that mixed realisations of Hildegard’s own 12th century music with sympathetic modern compositions. The three distinct yet complementary voices (Emily Burn, Victoria Couper, Clemmie Franks) are even more confident and vivid now than when they first delighted us five years ago. There were rich lower tones suggesting earthy Eastern European folk song; there were sustained drones above which floated melismatic chants that would suddenly soar to stratospheric heights; there were sequences of complex close harmony and delicate counterpoint – essentially almost all you might imagine three well-matched voices could achieve. Just memorising an hour of such long and complicated passages, that was a marvel; performing them with such musicality, that was a delight; an hour of such intense concentration is about as long as any audience could manage but these exquisite singers perform this feat twice in an evening – that is astonishing!

St Martin’s Church,
20 October 2024

Rating:

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Hildegard of Bingen – Antiphona: O successores

Hildegard – Responsorium: Favus distillans

Marcus Davidson – Musical Harmony

Laura Moody – Humility & Universe as Body from Hildegard Portraits

Tim Lea Young – Three Wings: pt 1

Hildegard – Antiphona: O virtus sapientie

Stevie Wishart – Azeruz

Moody – Sermon & Sing from Hildegard Portraits

Hildegard – Antiphona: O mirum admirandum

Wishart – O Choruscans Lux Stellarum

Hildegard – Antiphona: O orzchis Ecclesia

Davidson – O Boundless Ecclesia

Moody – O Woman from Hildegard Portraits

Moody – Love from Hildegard Portraits

Emily Levy – How Sweetly You Burn

Hildegard Antiphona – Unde quocumque venientes

Moody The Living Light from Hildegard Portraits