Baroque Tenor and Hesperion XXI

[doversoul1]

Saturday
Hitting the Heights
Catherine Bott explores the early days of the tenor voice with two notable modern-day exponents, John Potter and James Gilchrist.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pmdq3

I look forward to this as the tenor voice seems to be a rather neglected species in Baroque opera.

Sunday
Lucie Skeaping presents highlights from Hesperion XXi's concert at the Fontfroide Festival in Narbonne, including dance music from the English Tudor golden age, by Anthony Holborne, John Dowland, Christopher Tye, Orlando Gibbons and William Byrd

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pmf83

[ardcarp]

Being of the tenor ilk, I found that a fascinating programme, and, incidentally, one where the presenter was totally at ease with both the subject matter and the guests, James Gilchrist and John Potter. The archive items were amazing, especially that of Leo Slezak, whose art IMO shone through the shortcomings of primitive recording techniques.

I have not read John Potter's book (something I must remedy at once) but I have read the Guardian Review:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/20/a-history-of-singing-review

Potter's main point in today's programme was that the HIPP performances of sung Baroque music we hear today are pretty much a construct of today and probably bear little relationship to previous practice...i.e. not very HIPP at all. He felt that in days of yore singers were in the driving seat, not the composers, and that literal readings of the musical score were probably rare. Ornamentation would have amounted to virtual cadenzas and vocal techniques of portamento, changes of register (head or chest voice), and throat manipulation would probably have been the norm.

The manifesto of our HIPP movement is that we are cutting out the accretions and excrescences of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and getting back to some form of purity and faithfulness to the written notes. John Potter casts doubt on all this and quotes singing treatises by Agricola and others to support his argument.

It should be added that lovely examples of both Potter's and Gilchrist's art are included in the show.

[jean]

So was a lovely example of Sting singing Dowland - about which, apart from the comments that his singing voice was very 'natural' and very like his speaking voice, and that he appeared to be very close-miked, they had nothing to say at all!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I wonder whether Sting will get a mention in next Saturday's BaL. As for sounding natural and being close-miked - surely the two statements are contradictory?

[ostuni]

I wonder whether Sting will get a mention in next Saturday's BaL. As for sounding natural and being close-miked - surely the two statements are contradictory?

Only if you think the 'natural' location for the lute song is on the modern concert stage. This may well be the case nowadays, but as all the contributors to this (superb) conversation agreed, the songs were intended for a domestic/court milieu, where the listeners would have been not that much further away than Sting's microphone.

(Not that I like his singing of Dowland - but, as James G pointed out, if you're singing lute songs in the Wigmore, and project to the back row, you're going to overbalance the lute...)

[doversoul1]

I wonder whether Sting will get a mention in next Saturday's BaL. As for sounding natural and being close-miked - surely the two statements are contradictory?

How I understood was that Dowland’s songs were intended for domestic settings, which made the modern performance in a concert hall rather ‘unnatural’. I didn’t get the impression that they actually thought being close miked was ‘natural’ but they (the guests) may have implied that the ‘original’ singers were not trained in classical music singing as we know it.

As for the programme, I was expecting to hear more about how the tenor voice was perceived in the days when castrati dominated the world of opera. Nevertheless, as I had often wondered why vocal performance did not come under HIPP scrutiny more often, John Potter’s comment was very interesting.