I recently had a recording of a 1993 concert digitized, and wanted to share some of the music with you. I felt a bit sheepish for letting it languish for so long (29 years!) – but it was a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) and I put off converting it to a CD. Probably another reason was that the group was a particular dream of mine that never was realized beyond that debut concert.
In 1993, I formed a vocal ensemble named “Millennium” – named for the coming “Y2K” which was on our minds, but also because I wanted the group to sing the music from the last thousand years – from Gregorian Chant to vocal jazz. I had a long infatuation with small one-on-a-part vocal groups, such as the King’s Singers, Hilliard Ensemble, the Dutch group Quink Vocal Ensemble, and the Manhattan Transfer. I had helped form the quartet Circa 1600 (see a previous post) whose life-span went from 1987 to 1992, and I was eager to re-form a group – so I collected singers to match Quink’s voicing (2 sopranos, alto, tenor, and bass), consisting of Jennifer Fanning, Lisa Cardwell Pontén, Doug Fullington, me, and David Stutz. As it turns out, the recording is a wonderful time-capsule of some of Seattle’s best singers at the time!
For our opening concert, I thought that the concept of the “Madrigal” would be a great vehicle to show the virtuosity of the group, because the genre covers at least 600 years of music history, so the program was called “An Exploration of Madrigals.” What is a madrigal? (click back on the title link to see the concert program). I invited a couple of guests – tenor Lorentz Lossius to enable us to do 6-part pieces, and harpsichordist Byron Schenkman (who was new to Seattle in 1993), to play continuo on some of the early seventeenth-century pieces. Some of our best performances were from the segment of the program called “Manneristic Madrigals” that involved all seven of us, so I offer them here.
As I wrote in the program notes about the following three pieces, they “were published as ‘madrigals,’ but display much of the features of the early Baroque: excessive chromaticism, virtuosity, and use of the basso continuo for support, or, as in Se vittorie si belle, as an integral part of the ensemble.” Both “Se vittorie” and “Zefiro torna, e’l bel tempo rimena” are by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), who more than anyone ushered in the Early Baroque period, and “Asciugate i begli occhi,” a supreme example of the chromatic writing of Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1612).
A humorous note: as the madrigal “Zefiro torna” moves to tragic utterances at “Ma per me, lasso,” a siren is heard outside the venue (Seattle’s Gethsemane Lutheran Church, across from the now-defunct Seattle Bus Depot).
I left in the applause after this section to indicate how well-received this concert was (I think that the foot-stamping can be attributed to Lorenz Lossius on the resonant stage floor!). Even though the dream of an ensemble of legacy through and beyond the Millennium was not realized, this concert will always be one of my fondest memories.