Radiant Dawn
Matilda Lloyd (trumpet)
The Gesualdo Six/Owain Park
rec. 2024, All Hallows, Gospel Oak, London
Text and translations included.
Hyperion CDA68465 [71]

Radiant Dawn is the tenth recording by The Gesualdo Six on Hyperion. It’s a wonderful addition to what is already one of the finest discographies of choral music to have appeared in the last ten years. Its theme is different shades of light in music, from the emergence pf the radiant dawn of the album’s title, to the ghostly terrors of a bitter and dark night on the battlements at Elsinore. Musically, there are two noticeable binding threads: plainchant, either as integral part of a composition or as an inspiration, and the superb trumpet playing of Matilda Lloyd, who joins the singers in many of the works. There are two new pieces especially written for the album and they sit extremely well with the other carefully chosen selections.

Alec Roth’s Night prayer, which opens the programme, is an ingenious exploration of the Compline hymn Te lucis ante terminum. Roth sets the chant in its original Latin texts and English translation and both are sung as a canon, the lower voices starting with the Latin and the higher voices with the English version commencing two bars later. It’s an ethereal and hypnotic sound. In this version Lloyd’s trumpet provides a descant, taking what was originally written as a soprano vocalise part, and when she joins the voices for the first time the effect is magical. 

O nata lux by Tallis is next. Not for the first time I was struck by how The Gesualdo Six’s singing of even the most well-known choral pieces has a freshness to it. It’s as if they have taken Tallis’s score apart and put it back together again. It sounds especially lovely coming after the Roth and you have to applaud Owain Park’s decision not to have done the obvious thing and chosen the Tallis setting of Te lucis ante terminum which was part of Roth’s inspiration for Night prayer. If you want to hear that combination, then look up the album by Suzi Digby and ORA, Many Are the Wonders (Harmonia Mundi HMM5284) which is a recital of Tallis compositions and new works inspired by them, for which the Roth was written. It’s marvellous, but here The Gesualdo Six show how well a different juxtaposition works.

Eleanor Daley’s Grandmother moon follows, a setting of the Mi’kmaq poet Mary Louise Martin’s ode to the full moon: ‘…a powerful sacred hoop of full light, /simplicity against the ebony blues and blacks/of night sky land…’  Daley’s composition is deceptively simple and appropriately luminous. When the occasional piquant use of dissonance occurs, for example the minor second for the two top line voices on the word ‘shadows’ in the second line, it’s transportive, as if we suddenly realise we’re in a work of magic realism.

The light thereof by Deborah Pritchard is a commission for Radiant Dawn and uses a text from the Book of Revelation which sets trumpet and voices in an initial cleverly patterned dialogue. As the conversation becomes more intense the two seem to combine and then reach a calm resolution. Lloyd’s playing at this point, using a mute, is exquisite and the overall balance of sound with the choir is judged to perfection here. Pritchard’s approach to composition is informed by her synaesthesia and the subtle shading and texture she achieves in this short work are really striking.

James MacMillan’s Advent motet O radiant dawn takes its harmonic inspiration from Tallis’s O nata lux and I think can be called a modern classic, not least because of the earworm MacMillan created in his setting of that first phrase, where ‘dawn’ is a two note whole tone progression, the first note being a grace note. Again The Gesualdo Six sound as if they have spent a lot of time with the music, so carefully calibrated and poised is their performance.

More Tallis follows, his glorious Easter motet Dum transisset Sabbatum. The first thing one notices here is how excellent the solo plainchant singing is and the transition to polyphony in both halves of the motet comes as a sort of glorious harmonic rush of joy, especially with Matilda Lloyd’s trumpet taking the florid top line. It sounds sublime, as does the rendition of Hildegard of Bingen’s O gloriosissimi given by Joseph Wicks which comes next.

Roxanna Panufnik’s O hearken is not only colourful in the timbres she creates, but has an olfactory too effect where, as Owain Park writes in his excellent booklet notes, its central section seems to evoke the lingering scent of incense rising in the body of the church. There’s a real momentum to The Gesualdo Six’s approach in the piece as a whole which aligns perfectly with Panufnik’s bold and colourful writing.

Robert White’s Christe, qui lux es et dies, in his second of four settings, is another piece which alternates between plainchant and polyphony and where Lloyd’s trumpet once more takes the top line. That line has the chant and it unfolds luminescently, almost luxuriously, in Lloyd’s rendition where the blend and contrast with the complex polyphony in the lower parts is deliciously realised.

Richard Barnard’s Aura is another Radiant Dawn commission and it’s a triumphant setting of Emily Berry’s deeply moving poem, taken from her collection Stranger, Baby. The collection is centred on Berry’s sense of loss at the death of her mother. Her text for Aura uses a distinctive layout as a visible representation of a fractured emotional state with unpunctuated lines split into two columns. The columns become intermittently closer as the poem progresses, and they join in the affecting realisation that ‘I could see past/the shimmer that   separates the living/& the dead I knew there was nothing/no separation’. Barnard’s inspired conception of how to realise the poem in music was to divide the voices between the columns and use the trumpet as bridge between them. As usual, words and explanations only get one so far – you have to hear this to believe how profoundly an emotional experience it is. When the lines I’ve quoted are reached, the repeated setting of the word ‘shimmer’, with the full choir coming together, singing richly and warmly, and Lloyd’s trumpet playing a joyful flourish is beyond moving. I might have thought Berry’s poem unimprovable until I heard this setting and performance. Incidentally, full credit to Hyperion for taking the care to typeset the poem properly in the booklet notes (don’t use the version that links from Berry’s own website, which does not).

Judith Bingham’s Enter Ghost is a recreation of the dramatic punch which comes in the first act of Hamlet, written for solo trumpet with a narrator/singer. It packs into its seven and a half minutes the appearance of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, the subsequent revelation by the Ghost to Hamlet that he was murdered and the last lines of Hamlet’s soliloquy at the end of Act 1 where he ‘rails against fate’ as Bingham puts it, at having to avenge his father’s death. It’s the most brilliant piece of trumpet writing, which delivers both narrative and drama and Matilda Lloyd’s playing is mesmerising. The piece is written for trumpet and Sprechgesang. The Sprechgesang comes in the final section of the piece where voice, the talented Josh Cooter, and trumpet come together very effectively for Hamlet’s lines, ‘O cursèd spite/That I was ever born to set it right’. I enjoyed Cooter’s reading of Bingham’s selected lines earlier in the piece which has a slight archness to it, especially as faux stage directions are substituted for quotations halfway through in an interesting meta-theatrical framing of Lloyd’s hyper-dramatic, sometimes frenetic ‘in character’ playing. Bingham’s composition is a fascinating, compelling piece that fits perfectly into this recital.

Owain Park is a talented composer of course, as well as singer and choir director. His Sommernacht is a jewel of a piece, setting a poem by Gertrud Triepel reflecting on the beauty and quiet of a summer’s night and contrasting it with a feeling of displacement. Commissioned as a response to Reger’s song of the same name (from his 5 Gesänge, Op. 98) Park cleverly mimics in voices what he calls Reger’s ‘hazy’ piano part with voices coming in and out of focus, a bit like hearing snatches of conversation, all of which gradually fade into the peaceful night. It’s clever and touching writing, perfectly realised here. It also leads very aptly into a fine performance of Rheinberger’s Abendlied, which is also about evening falling and also has a certain poignancy, the exhortation to Jesus from two of his disciples to stay with them after he appeared to them on the road to Emmaus, from Luke’s Gospel. I always think that the piece’s evocation of place is somehow enhanced by Rheinberger’s deliberate recollection of the choral music of the Renaissance. There’s nobility and colour as well as conjuration in this performance.

The second selection from James MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets is the penultimate item.  In splendoribus sanctorum was written to be performed during Communion at Christmas Midnight Mass. It has a wonderful contrast between relatively simple and restrained writing for voices and an absolutely magnificent obligato trumpet part. It feels like the apotheosis of the album and the concept behind it. Park writes that in concert The Gesualdo Six and Lloyd would perform this last, disappearing from the stage as the music ebbs away, as though the music was already becoming a memory for the audience. It is very effective on disc too, but it’s not the last item.

That’s because in a delightful surprise we are given a performance of Geoffrey Burgon’s Nunc dimittis. This is a piece of music associated with the end of a performance I suppose, having been written to accompany each week’s closing credits in the BBC’s 1979 adaptation of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It has had a life of its own in performance by choirs since but I can’t recall a performance quite as magical as this one, beautiful solo singing, superbly balanced choir and Lloyd’s perfectly judged burnished sound. If it doesn’t completely banish a feeling of nostalgia for those of us who have watched the series, it is another example of the approach of The Gesualdo Six, bringing a new dimension to everything they sing. It is the best way imaginable to bring this fantastic recital, excellently recorded in All Hallows Gospel Oak, to a close.

Dominic Hartley

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Contents
Alec Roth (b.1948)
Night prayer
Thomas Tallis (c1505-1585)
O nata lux de lumine
Dum transisset Sabbatum
Eleanor Daley (b.1955)
Grandmother moon
Deborah Pritchard (b.1977)
The light thereof
Sir James Macmillan (b.1959)
O radiant dawn
In splendoribus sanctorum
Saint Hildegard Of Bingen (1098-1179)
O gloriosissimi
Roxanna Panufnik (b.1968)
O hearken
Robert White (c.1538-1574)
Christe, qui lux es et dies II
Richard Barnard (b.1977)
Aura
Judith Bingham (b.1952)
Enter Ghost
Owain Park (b.1993)
Sommernacht
Joseph Rheinberger (1839-1901)
Abendlied
Geoffrey Burgon (1941-2010)
Nunc dimittis