The Gabrielis in Venice
VOICES & INSTRUMENTS
Tutor: Gawain Glenton
Location: Carver Uniting Church, Windermere
Reviewer: Liz Richards
The Gabrielis in Venice (Cumbria Festival Chorus Choral Day in association with NWEMF)
On Saturday 22 June more than 80 people gathered in the Carver Uniting Church Windermere to explore works by Giovanni Gabrieli, Andrea Gabrieli and Claudio Merulo. This was a collaborative venture with Cumbria Festival Chorus that allowed us to tackle complex choral works, ranging from 10 parts to 16 parts.
The organisation involved in moving singers and instrumentalists between choirs to accommodate the different voice combinations for each piece was a triumph. Many thanks to Jenny Walsh for her helpful instructions with a diagrammatic representation for each work. The music was presented in a booklet which made it easy to go through and mark the relevant voice part for each piece – the advice to bring a highlighter pen was much appreciated, to mark the beginning of my line, when my allocations moved between seventh line down (twice), up to second line, then down to thirteenth and lastly fourteenth line on the page.
The day was notable for some excellent sight-reading by singers and instrumentalists, expertly directed by Gawain, an early music specialist. He is a co-director of The English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble, with whom he has recorded several acclaimed CDs. Gawain demonstrated his practical musicianship with an amazing example of diminutions on the cornett weaving improvised decorative ornamentation around choral lines to illustrate how this music might have sounded at the time it was written. His knowledge of the period and the music was delivered in bitesize chunks, adding insights to the background of each piece as well as general information about the musical scene in late sixteenth century Venice.
It is inevitable that the degree of polish and attention to detail will be limited when everyone is sight-reading music new to them – and for some singers this was an unfamiliar sound-world. Gawain sensibly focused on a few points of phrasing that were applicable to all the music studied, enabling absorption by repetition. He also ensured that we were aware of the sense of the words we were singing. The first piece studied, Deus qui beatum Marcum (10 part) by Giovanni Gabrieli, was relatively straightforward to sight-read giving an immediate sense of achievement. A splendid start to a day that progressed in difficulty and complexity as we moved through another Giovanni Gabrieli: Domine exaudi orationem meam (10 part), Andrea Gabrieli: Sanctus and Benedictus (12 part), Claudio Merulo: Sanctus Primo Toni (16 part) and finally back to Giovanni Gabrieli: Omnes Gentes (16 part). Instrumentalists were placed around the room in different choirs, sometimes taking a solo line. Their playing was greatly appreciated by the singers especially when a loud wind instrument was on the same line! The final session singing through all the works was tremendously satisfying, if inevitably a little rough in places and certainly left me wanting more. The music has lost none of its power to delight and move us after over four hundred years and Gawain provided us with a most enjoyable and informative day’s music making.
Liz Richards
First published in August 2019 Newsletter
