12 December 2022
Renaissance gems unearthed
Here’s Helen’s account of our recent Byrd/Vivanco project, in collaboration with the Spanish cultural ministry (CNDM) and the Ubeda and Baeza Early Music Festival.
Performing in Ubeda Cathedral.
“As an ensemble specialising in early music, it’s not very often that we get the chance to do a ‘world premiere’ (aside from the few fabulous pieces that we have been lucky enough to have commissioned for us over the years). However, our recent project for a concert in the Ubeda and Baeza Early Music Festival allowed us to sing the ‘modern’ premiere of no fewer than four pieces in one concert, all by the Spanish composer, Sebastián de Vivanco.
“This collaboration came out of our Cellar of Forgotten Notes project from summer 2021, when we recorded a treasure trove of pieces that had been collected and edited by Bruno Turner during his long and illustrious career as a musicologist. These pieces had been typeset by Gareth Thomas and we very much enjoyed using his clear and accurate editions. I mentioned that we were always on the look out for any newly unearthed gems from dusty archives and he replied that he had just embarked on a project of editing a couple of volumes of Vivanco’s works from the archives in Salamanca Cathedral. I had always loved singing Vivanco’s exuberant Song of Songs setting, ‘Veni dilecte mi’ but didn’t know many of his other works. 2022 sees the 400th anniversary of Vivanco’s death, and of course we were looking ahead to celebrating the anniversary of our own William Byrd next year, so pairing the two seemed an obvious idea! The idea was taken up by CNDM, the Spanish cultural ministry.
“We set about compiling a programme which paired some of Byrd’s finest works with pieces by Vivanco on the same theme. This was easier said than done, as we had to commission Gareth to edit the Vivanco pieces from the original manuscript and he couldn’t approach Salamanca Cathedral to ask for these pieces until we had a programme finalised. Stuck in a slightly chicken and egg situation, Gareth had to guess the appropriate pieces based on their titles and rough length in the manuscript!
“Fortunately, after much wrangling with language barriers (with grateful thanks to our ever-dependable Spanish agent, Pablo!), Cathedral bureaucracy and international bank transfers, Gareth managed to get hold of the scans of the pages he needed! We also used a few pieces which had already been edited by the Spanish musicologist, Jorge Martin Valle.
“It’s been a real thrill to explore these pieces and to think that we are the first people to sing this repertoire for over three hundred years (and almost certainly the first women!). Commissioning living composers has always been a small part of our work, but I’m glad we can also throw a spotlight into some of the darker, dustier corners of the archives as there are still some real treasures waiting to be uncovered. I was talking to the conductor and musicologist Stephen Rice the other day about singing in a conference about twenty years ago and performing a newly rediscovered piece that even the most eminent musicologists had never heard before. That piece was Clemens ‘Ego flos campi’, which is now such a staple of the early music repertoire that it appears on many compilations, I think we have performed it about a hundred times with Stile Antico and four members of the group have even had it at their weddings! It’s exciting to think that there are still pieces like that out there, waiting to be rediscovered!
“We’re very grateful to the Stile Antico Foundation and a generous patron of the group for their financial support of this project.”