The Gesualdo Six outside Gesualdo; and others
I: The Gesualdo Six, Monday 13
My first experience of the Gesualdo Six, earlier this year, was all in the music of Carlo Gesualdo himself (1566-1613). On Monday 13 July, at the Wigmore Hall, they sang “The Wishing Tree”, an anthology of songs from the sixteenth century to the twentyfirst, songs mainly British but with a few French and Italian included. I’m even more of a fan now - and happy to hear that they’ll now begin a five-year Wigmore residency.
Over the duration of Monday’s hour-long lunchtime concert at the Wigmore Hall, you came to know all six Gesualdo Six voices: one bass, one baritone, two tenors, two altos or countertenors - six voices that share a very similar style, even schooling, but among which each has a pronounced character of its own, so that it’s a sensuous surprise to find how well they meld together: an object-lesson in harmony. When you hear Joseph Wicks and Josh Cooter, the two tenors, in solo moments, it’s especially surprising to find how well they merge when singing together. Wicks, a founder member of the Six with many solo moments, is mellifluous and dulcet; Cootes, the most recent singer to join, has a more oboe-like voice, with more vibrato. Yet these two combine beautifully: the Poulenc “Petites voix” a group of five vocal trios written for children, was sung here by the two tenors and one bass, with each voice lightly but gorgeously showing the composer’s shifts of harmonic tension.
The group’s bass, Owain Park, is also its director: he, Wicks, and countertenor Alasdair Austin were founder members. Park also composed the song “When love speaks” (a setting of Shakespeare’s “Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds”), with its musically eloquent setting of the final word, “harmony”. And his was the haunting arrangement of Anna Semple’s “My bonny lies over the ocean”, with its contrasts of vocal solos and multiple echo effects.
In this concert, the countertenor Guy James, indisposed, was replaced by the alto Amy Blythe. While it’s fair to say her voice was the most alien presence - with a different kind of edge to her voice - she remained a quietly stylish contributor. The baritone, Simon Grant, makes a vocally genial and verbally precise impression throughout. The group’s second countertenor, Alasdair Austin, is perhaps its best exemplar in the house style of sustaining steadily long notes with wonderful intimacy. His voice, like the others, vibrates with minimal but present vibrato: a lovely paradox.
Monday’s “Wishing Tree” fare ranged from William Byrd (the infectious madrigal “This sweet and merry month of May”) to Joby Talbot (author of the title song), from Josquin des Prez to Charles Stanford, with several traditional songs included. Although it was a delight to cover several centuries and languages, the repertory’s common factor was the marvellously transcendent quality of ensemble, often verging on play.
II: Karim Suleyman with Sean Shibe, Tuesday 14
“Was that not heaven?” one old friend texted me after Tuesday 14’s recital by the Lebanese-American tenor Karim Suleyman and the guitarist Sean Shibe, while another old friend texted me to say almost the diametric opposite. (He craved a strong fix of Wagner.) Disappointingly timid though this may sound, I’m somewhere in the middle between them.
The recital’s title was “Broken Branches”: the programmes “touches on the mystical nature of being, something innate that connects different cultures, religions and regions with deep bonds of common kinship, and the universal stories and emotions that bring people together in union”. Suleyman and Shibe performed a multicultural diaspora of songs - with a few guitar solos. I had heard that Suleyman was unusually tall - and so he is; but I was not expecting him to be seated throughout the recital. He and Shibe did stand stood a few times, by way of punctuation in between some groups, but not when making music together; and they did not leave the stage. The mood was intimate.
Too intimate, alas: you could feel this was not a concert that embraced the rear rows of the Wigmore Hall. Before the single encore, Suleyman thanked the audience; he hoped that fare such as theirs was the way to help the world from its current troubles. This was one touch of artistic narcissism we didn’t need - thank you for the way your applause shows how well you appreciate the way we are healing the ills of society - and parts of it were rendered inaudible by Shibe’s tactic of softly playing his guitar right through Suleyman’s words.
Their material ranged fram the Italian and English Renaissance to the late twentieth century, and varied from the Italian composer Giulio Caccini to Britten’s “Songs from the Chinese”. This only begins to suggest the recital’s multicultural nature: it also included Sephardic, Andalusian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Sufi items. Suleyman’s diction is always lucid and idiomatic; he’s good company, taking the audience into his eclectic, expressive, celebratory character.
His voice has almost the lightness of an Italian tenorino, but with a stronger element of chest. And his vibrato often (not always) is too intrusive for us to feel the music’s line. I’m all for the connections between diverse cultures, but parts of this recital verged on the precious. The recital took its title from Layale Chaker’s song, to words by Sinan Antoon, “A Butterfly in New York”: “Three decades later/ in another continent/ it perched on my shoulder/ Blue/ Like the sea’s thoughts/ Or the tears of a dying angel/ its wings two leaves/ Falling from heaven…/ Does it know/ That I no longer run after butterflies?/ Just watch them in silence/ That I live/ Like a broken branch.” Sorry, but I find all this, to use an expression of George Balanchine’s, “Too fancy.”
III: The Smile of Her, Thursday 18
At the Marylebone Theatre, the actress Christina Lahti is currently giving her “The Smile of Her”, which would be a one-woman show but for occasional contributions by one child actor (who plays, by turns, her younger self or her younger sister). It’s a well-meaning first-person account of family relationships, beginning with (and returning to) Lahti’s own Midwestern family as a paradigm of what’s wrong with American society and why feminism has long been needed.
Ultimately, though, this is a sentimental show. The title refers to Lahti’s mother, who always knows how to keep smiling through, and whose determination to smile through an abusive marriage at first keeps her from revealing her own creativity and strengths from her family (six children). Good for Mom, but her redeeming smile is not enough to save her children from grief - or, by implication, to save America from deadening conformism.
I don’t doubt the partly grim truth of the tale Lahti has to tell - which includes tales of rape and suicide. Yet her rendition is so heavily amplified that it makes us feel that she’s shy of speaking out. (The Marylebone Theatre is not large, and has been used for plays without mikes.) Meaning to pull us into her voice, Lahti has the opposite effect: we can’t help but feel distanced from her. She’s an outgoing personality, yet she doesn’t reach out to us: hers is a solo confidently addressed to the bathroom mirror.
@Alastair Macaulay