{"id":8711,"date":"2025-04-03T14:06:23","date_gmt":"2025-04-03T12:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=8711"},"modified":"2025-04-03T14:09:20","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T12:09:20","slug":"a-prayer-for-the-excluded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=8711","title":{"rendered":"A Prayer for the Excluded"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whenever I come to Cambridge, I am astonished by the wealth of music on offer. Bulletin boards and fences of squares are full of posters announcing performances in churches, concert halls and theatres \u2014 featuring local ensembles and orchestras, but also visiting artists whose recitals would be hailed in Poland as the event of the season. Not a day goes without a classical music concert; in February there were days when there were as many as a dozen or so. The city has a population of less than 150,000 and yet when it comes to the number of musical initiatives, it beats Warsaw, ten times more populous, hands down.<\/p>\n

It also has its own recurring event, the Cambridge Music Festival, founded in 1991 and directed for the past thirteen years by Justin Lee, who previously worked with the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, the Academy of Ancient Music and the Cambridge University ensembles. The festival is held twice a year. This year\u2019s \u201cspring\u201d edition ended in mid-March, but among those heralding spring were musicians of the excellent Pavel Haas Quartet, the much-loved Jordi Savall and the phenomenal British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor.<\/p>\n

And the legendary ensemble Theatre of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier, with a lineup of four singers \u2014 just as at their first concert in 1990, when they premiered Arvo P\u00e4rt\u2019s Berliner Messe<\/em>. Seven years later the composer wrote another version of the piece, for choir and string orchestra. The original version \u2014 for four soloists and organ \u2014 is a concert rarity these days, which is why I took this unique opportunity to hear it conducted by the same artist who at St. Hedwig\u2019s Cathedral in Berlin brought to live life both the new ensemble and P\u00e4rt\u2019s new work, and with the same organist, Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, to boot.<\/p>\n

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Theatre of Voices. Photo: Gerhard Wilting<\/p>\n

The concert at Trinity College Chapel was held on the occasion of yet another anniversary \u2014 twenty-five years of the Cambridge Music Conference, a series of meetings inaugurated by Elizabeth Carmack at the inspiration of her sister Catherine, who at that time was battling a terminal illness, and focused from the beginning on the idea of healing through music. Quite esoteric at first and carried out in the spirit of Rudolf Steiner\u2019s anthroposophy, the programme of the conference has evolved into a venture combining creativity, music therapy, as well as humanitarian and human rights work. Behind it is a complicated and tragic family history: the sisters\u2019 father was the Canadian pianist, composer and teacher Murray Carmack, who, in a country where homosexuality was a criminal offence, escaped his own orientation by marrying a woman; Catherine died of cancer at the age of 46; the stepson of the mother, who after her divorce married the prominent biblical scholar Roger Norman Whybray, fell victim to AIDS at the height of the epidemic. This string of anguish and misery gave rise to something remarkable \u2014 a project resulting in a series of composer commissions and concrete outreach initiatives, with past participants including Mark Anthony Turnage and John Tavener, as well as Tavener\u2019s student Judith Weir.<\/p>\n

In addition to Berliner Messe<\/em>, the programme of the Theatre of Voices\u2019 February concert featured compositions by other artists associated with Elizabeth Carmack\u2019s venture. First came the British premiere of The Tree of Life <\/em>by Nigel Osborne, who, after studying at Oxford, continued his education with Witold Rudzi\u0144ski at Warsaw\u2019s State School of Music and collaborated for some time with the Polish Radio\u2019s Experimental Studio. Since the 1990s he has been using his experience in pioneering methods of working with children marked by the trauma of conflicts: the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Caucasus, the Middle East, East Africa, Myanmar and Ukraine.\u00a0The Tree of Life <\/em>is the fruit of his therapeutic work with Syrian refugees in Lebanon \u2014 a musical performance consisting of seven stories about objects that accompanied the refugees in their wandering and played an important role in their lives. An olive branch from the father\u2019s orchard; a Muslim misbaha<\/em> rosary and a Christian rosary from Maaloula, whose inhabitants still speak Aramaic; a red stone the colour of the family house and blood; a casket with two coins minted in the year of the mother\u2019s birth; a yellow balloon and a picture of clouds \u2014 in each of these stories, combined by Osborne into a surprisingly light and clear structure, the dominant element is melody oscillating between Western tonality and the microtonality of the Eastern maqam<\/em>, highlighted by the accompaniment of the Arabic oud<\/em> lute (Rihab Azar). In the course of the performance it transpired that the sound design of the quartet in its current lineup rested on the foundation of an exceptionally dense bass voice (William Gaunt), gradually thinning out towards the top (tenor Jakob Skjoldborg, alto Laura Lamph, soprano Else Torp). This choice of soloists enabled Hillier to play not only with range, but also with timbre \u2014 with excellent results in other works as well.<\/p>\n

This is especially true of two arrangements of Callimachus\u2019 beautiful elegy on the death of his friend, the poet Heraclitus \u2014 in an English translation by William Johnson Cory, who was expelled from Eton in 1872 for an \u201cinappropriate\u201d letter to one of his students. Murray Carmack used it as a pretext for a kind of musical coming-out, giving his composition a touch of utter sadness and sensual melancholy. The other Heraclitus<\/em>, by Howard Skempton, was written in 2021, on the 100th anniversary of Carmack\u2019s birth. And it certainly draws on the original, creating a similar mood, although by completely different means \u2014 deceptive simplicity of form, consonant harmony, prominence of the melodic element.<\/p>\n

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Arvo P\u00e4rt. Photo: Dorota Kozi\u0144ska<\/p>\n

As an interlude before the Berliner Messe <\/em>we heard an organ version of Kevin Volans\u2019 Walking Song<\/em>, performed by Bowers-Broadbent, who gracefully and with ease highlighted the overlapping melodic and rhythmic patterns, which brought to mind irresistible associations with the oeuvre of Steve Reich, who, after all, drew on the same, African sources of inspiration. And then the musical heaven opened.<\/p>\n

It would be hard to find a better, more internally diverse example of P\u00e4rt\u2019s tintinnabuli<\/em> technique than the Berlin Mass<\/em>. The composer named the technique after the Latin term for the bells mounted on pole and placed in Catholic basilicas as a sign of link to the pope. He reduced the material to the form of two voices in a kind of counterpoint: the melodic voice, which wanders around a specific centre, and the \u201ctintinnabular\u201d voice, which highlights the individual components of the harmonic triad. P\u00e4rt discovered musical asceticism, a new simplicity, sometimes equated with minimalism. Wrongly, because its essence is not the repetition of a pattern, but the gradual subtraction of the musical material \u2014 like the mystical \u201cstillness\u201d practiced by the Orthodox hesychast monks. And this is what happened in the Berliner Messe<\/em>, which, in Theatre of Voices\u2019 inspired performance, took us into a completely different dimension of feeling reality. The musicians fulfilled P\u00e4rt\u2019s will: the first voice of the tintinnabuli<\/em> sounded like the sum of human iniquities, the second \u2014 like a universal redemption of guilt.<\/p>\n

After the concert we went out into the courtyard and all looked up, where a parade of planets was just taking place in the night sky. For a moment I thought I heard sounds coming from outer space.<\/p>\n

Translated by: Anna Kijak<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I come to Cambridge, I am astonished by the wealth of music on offer. Bulletin boards and fences of squares are full of posters announcing performances in churches, concert halls and theatres \u2014 featuring local ensembles and orchestras, but also visiting artists whose recitals would be hailed in Poland as the event of the … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-mangusta","4":"post-8711","6":"format-standard","7":"category-posts-in-english","8":"category-wedrowki-operowe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8714,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8711\/revisions\/8714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}