Issue #69
Last Update October 31, 2010
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Arts Dialogos by David Katz October 10, 2009 The reason one attends live concerts instead of just listening to CDs is the possibility that one will be present at a thrilling event, a live performance that approaches perfection. Dialogos, a French vocal ensemble participating in the Music Before 1800 concert series, provided just such an experience on October 4th. The program, performed by four female voices, organized a series of religious and secular works illustrating the earliest Western polyphony into a vocal murder mystery.
The program lists the four singers, Clara Coutouly, Els Janssens, Katarina Livljanic and Aurore Tillac, but doesn't do the usual soprano, alto, tenor classification. The music itself is not organized that way, and each of the performers must contend with the entire vocal range inherent in the pieces performed. It is a tribute to their musicianship that each was able to provide pure, delicious tones from the lowest notes to the highest. The clarity and strength of their voices served the music well.
The concert was organized into five sections, titled Benedictus Benedictus, From Winchester to Fleury, Playing with Words and Sounds, Be Like Men Who Are Waiting, and My Seducers Came Together, and represented music stretching from the tenth century to the seventeenth. It illustrates the relationship between the liturgical music at Winchester and that at Fleury, which Winchester used as a model in the ecclesiastical reforms of Bishop Ethelwold, and explores the career of Abbo of Fleury, who was brought to England to be scholaster (director of studies) at Ramsey Abbey. On his return from Ramsey, Abbo was named Abbot of Fleury, where his acerbic personality and intolerance of mediocrity made him many enemies, including Ranulf, Bishop of Orleans. Ultimately, Abbo was murdered, perhaps at the behest of Ranulf, whose guards had previously killed a servant of Abbo in an attack on Abbo's life.
The October 4th concert “offers a musical recreation in which the 10th century music is placed in dialog with improvisations in the style of the medieval singers whom Abbo might have heard in his abbey,” as the program states. Liturgical pieces are interspersed with a setting of an acrostic poem, “Otto valens”, composed by Abbo himself, another acrostic poem by Wulfstan of Winchester, a prayer to ward off fever, and a reconstruction of an epitaph on the death of Abbo.
Katarina Livjanic directs Dialogos, and was its founder. Born in Croatia, she moved to France, where she earned a PhD in Musicology. She is currently on the faculty of the Sorbonne, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Wellesley. Many of the pieces performed at this concert were transcribed by her, or reconstructed by her from documentary evidence and the musical practices of the time.
Dialogos http://www.ensemble-dialogos.org/en/
New York Stringer is published by NYStringer.com. For all communications, contact David Katz, Editor and Publisher, at david@nystringer.com