Hilliard Ensemble at the Freer
The Freer Gallery of Art hosts an eclectic and sporadic series of free concerts, often in tandem with relevant exhibits. To cap off the fine exhibit of early Bible manuscripts at the Sackler Gallery (reviewed here last month), the museum hosted one of the best vocal groups in the world, the Hilliard Ensemble, last night. The all-male British quartet brought a program called Arkhangelos, modern and older pieces in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, to the Meyer Auditorium.
The Hilliards are known primarily for their exquisite recordings and live performances of Renaissance and medieval polyphony, as in their acclaimed 2006 CD of music by Nicolas Gombert. However, they also commission and perform new and experimental music (as in Officium, their popular recording with saxophonist Jan Garbarek), and that was the focus of this thorny and challenging concert.
The program takes its name, Arkhangelos, from a piece of that title by English composer Ivan Moody (b. 1964), at the opening of the concert's second half. The text is a 6th-century poem by Agathius Scholasticus, about how meditating on an icon of St. Michael impacts a person's mind. The musical setting is appropriately inward and mysterious, mostly with very pretty sounds. It goes well with a piece near it in the program, Arvo Pärt's Most Holy Mother of God, an ecstatic litany on the words "Holy Mother of God, save us" premiered by the Hilliard Ensemble in 2005. The texture of this piece alternates between layering of slow melodic lines and a harried homorhythmic mantra-like section, which grows from softness through an arching crescendo.
The group also had fine moments in another work composed for them, Alexander Raskatov's Praise, a setting of five liturgical texts from the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. The very dissonant logic of the first piece, Hymn of the Cherubim, meant that at crucial points, unisons solemnly resolved to seconds, as Raskatov used grating dissonance, piled up in succession, to propel the piece through rocking swells. The opposite effect is achieved in the second piece, The Lord's Prayer, where at certain points the four voices end up on the same note in four different octaves. Gentle Light contrasts the declamation of the text in highest and lowest voices with an ison (drone) of ostinato with glissandi in the middle voices. The fourth movement's speech rhythms were, frankly, a little silly, but the minimalistic repetition of the pulsing fifth movement was exciting, speeding up like a whirling dervish to a sudden end.
Hilliard Ensemble, photo by Friedrun Reinhold
On one of their many trips, to Armenia in 2004, the Hilliard Ensemble recorded several traditional Armenian sacred songs called sharakans, in arrangements by a monk-composer named Komitas. Most of these Armenian pieces heard last night were unremarkable -- static and atmospheric, with drones and cantillation effects -- but Surp, Ter zorutheanc (the text of the Latin Sanctus) was lovely.
The program mostly favored the Hilliard Ensemble's strengths, able as they are to sing with pure intonation even the most complex and dissonant harmonies, with the tightest control over a wide range of dynamics. The group's vocal quality occasionally shows its age, but nothing more serious than an occasional instability or stridency. Countertenor David James sounded slightly constricted and scratchy in the Nonantolan chant Ote to stauron he sang alone. He had an excellent turn on the top of Sirt in sasani, the strangest and most intriguing sharakan. Baritone Gordon Jones's solo in one of the Armenian pieces, Bazmutyung hreshtakac, revealed a voice still remarkably round and full.
Although this was an excellent program, I confess with some guilt that my hunger for some Gombert or Tallis only worsened as the evening progressed. That desire was to remain unsated, as even the encore was a modern piece, a sweet arrangement by Estonian composer Veljo Tormis of a traditional lullaby.
The next classical concerts at the Freer Gallery of Art are the second and third appearances of the Musicians from Marlboro (March 28 and May 9).