Programme and Performers
Jan Dismas Zelenka Lamentation V
Georg Philipp Telemann Du aber, Daniel
interval
Johann Sebastian Bach Actus Tragicus
David Fennessy Bog Cantata world premiere
Dunedin Consort
John Butt conductor
Nardus Williams soprano
Jess Dandy alto
Ed Lyon tenor
Roderick Williams baritone
Programme note
This evening’s programme of cantatas is littered with correspondences and connections that lay the groundwork for David Fennessy’s newly commissioned Bog Cantata, which tonight receives its world premiere. All four works, in their own ways, take advantage of unusual, bottom-heavy instrumentations and intertwining pairs of cellos, recorders and violas da gamba that invite us to reflect on both earthy and earthly things. Taken together, these cantatas and their texts offer richly human and humane material for our consideration.
We open with a remarkable piece by Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745), who studied in Vienna and Venice but found his longest employment in Dresden. Although he never officially rose to the post of Kapellmeister at the Dresden court and seems to have gone relatively unappreciated by employers in courts and chapels, he was highly regarded by fellow musicians and composers, including J S Bach and Telemann. He is one of a host of now largely neglected Bohemian composers and is perhaps best-known today for his extraordinary writing for woodwind players. His six sonatas for two oboes and bassoon are notable for their invention and fiendish difficulty, perfect examples of his idiosyncratic approach to harmonic language and instrumentation. We find those same qualities in his set of six Lamentations for Holy Week. To open the first half, we hear the fifth of the set, and the first for Holy Saturday, in which Zelenka deploys a tenor in conversation with pairs of recorders and cellos, supported by a full continuo team. The composer takes full advantage of having matched pairs of instruments, sometimes yoking them together, sometimes freeing them to interlace and dovetail with each other and the solo voice.
Jeremiah’s Lamentations are the writings of a prophet pushed beyond his limits, distraught at the state of all he sees around him. His sense of desolation and deep desire for Jerusalem to turn back to the Lord fit well with the liturgical and narrative progress of Holy Week. As had become standard practice for composers across Europe, Zelenka sets the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as decorated vocalises. Fossilised in the Latin text of the Vulgate, they serve as headings for each of the bible verses. Like the first letter of an illuminated manuscript, these fleeting movements contain a superabundance of artistry – the fizzingly buoyant textures of the opening ‘Heth’are in total contrast to the yearning entanglements between the two cellos and voice for ‘Yod’.
Next comes Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767) and one of the most exceptionally beautiful cantatas in his astonishingly large catalogue of more than 1,300. Du aber Daniel, gehe hin is a funeral cantata for an unknown, but likely significant, public figure. A natural foil to Actus Tragicus in both subject matter and instrumentation, the opening instrumental Sonata introduces us to the unusual combination of recorder, violin, oboe, bassoon and two violas da gamba in obbligato roles. Together they set a recognisably funereal mood, with keening suspensions from oboe and violin and softer notes of mourning from the recorder and violas da gamba. After the first of two framing choruses, we move into the theological and consolatory meat of the cantata with solo movements for both bass and soprano. Perhaps the highlight of these is the astonishing soprano aria, ‘Brecht, ihr müden Augenlieder’. Working in unison, the gambas knit a flowing stream of semiquavers punctuated by an insistently tolling or ticking figure from recorder and pizzicato violin and continuo. In the midst of this, the soprano pleads for eyelids and limbs to succumb to the sweet sleep of death and for angels to bear the body up to heaven. This is just one of the moments in the work in which Telemann manages to bend time, as grief often does – time both seems to stop and yet march irresistibly onwards.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) achieves a very similar effect in the heart-breaking Sonatina that opens Actus Tragicus and our second half. Again, the mourning mood is set by paired violas da gamba and recorders in a movement that lasts less than three minutes but has an utterly eternal quality as the pairs loop and weave. Coming from early in his career at Mühlhausen, the transformational message of the cantata is born out in the music as material from that opening Sonatina is metabolised into a celebratory final chorus. Unlike the Telemann, which ends with sleep, Bach bolts on a remarkably buoyant doxology that undercuts the potential for gloom and invites a smiling enjoyment both of life and the prospect of Paradise. Sung in this performance by single voices, there is a plangent and then joyous clarity to the choral movements that seem to flow freely in and out of the shorter solo reflections and provocations.
David Fennessy takes up the forces of Actus Tragicus for his own journey into, and excavation of, the peat bog, bringing new stories to the light with old instruments.
© Edward Edgcumbe
Composer's note
I first saw an image of the Fadden More Psalter in a newspaper article, clarted in mud and peat, resembling what can only be described as lasagne, with faint letters and parts of words barely decipherable. I knew immediately there was a piece buried in there somewhere.
When I was asked by the Dunedin Consort to compose a cantata, there was no doubt in my mind that this make a suitable subject. I loved the idea of setting these fragments of psalms to music (I had already experimented with the fragmentation of older texts in previous vocal pieces), but realised I needed something more, a contemporary view, to illuminate this unearthed object. I wanted to embrace the storytelling aspect of the cantata and needed a guide to take the listener out onto, and indeed into the bog itself.
I have been aware of the writing of the Marina Carr for many years and it could be argued that no Irish writer has delved as deep into the dark histories and mysteries of bogs as she has in such stage works as Portia Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats and many others. As we worked together and talked about what this new piece could ultimately be, it was clear that she was moved by the stories surrounding bog bodies – those corpses discovered semi-preserved by the bog, their lives having often come to violent ends. Who were these people? How did they end up there?
In the end, Marina created a wonderful, rich text in which these characters were given a voice but, crucially, so too was the bog. The bog is the central character in this drama, withholding secrets, protecting, preserving, nurturing and divulging when it sees fit. I realised that what I needed to do as a composer, rather than setting texts from the Psalter itself, was to imagine a piece of music that had itself been buried for centuries in the bog and dug up. I asked my father – who grew up in Croghan, right in the middle of the Bog of Allen in Ireland – to name the first tune that came to his mind when I mentioned that place and he responded: ‘The Lark in the clear air’. I subjected that melody to the same process of obfuscation, redaction and partial decay that the bog had upon the Psalter so that what we hear in the Bog Cantata often seems familiar yet incomplete. There is a puzzle to be solved. Fragments of a melody, snatches of harmony, grace notes floating on the air, lines buried in the peat …
© David Fennessy
