Christina Pluhar on Terra Mater

The European early music group L'Arpeggiata turns 25 this year, and has joined forces with Swedish mezzo Malena Ernman to mark the occasion with a programme of music inspired by the natural world: featuring opera arias by Gasparini, Bononcini and Orlandini, instrumental pieces by Biber and Merula, and a selection of traditional English folksongs and dances, Terra Mater is released next Friday on Erato.

The ensemble's director Christina Pluhar joined me on video-call from Salzburg last month to discuss how the programme came together, the challenges and pleasures of bringing sparsely-notated folk-music to life, the group's passion for experimentation and improvisation, and their plans for a two-fold celebration in Paris next month...

Who was the driving-force behind this fascinating project?

The collaboration between Malena Ernman and L’Arpeggiata was initiated by Michael Schade, who is Artistic Director of the International Baroque Festival in Melk Abbey in Austria. He invited us to create a new program for a concert at the festival in 2023. The minute this idea came up, I knew that I would like to create a program around the theme “nature”. The concert was such a huge success that we decided to record it, and this is how our lovely new CD Terra Mater came to life.

It is wonderful to hear Malena Ernman again on CD...

I’m so happy about the collaboration with her. She’s really at the peak of her mature artistry today, and she has a vast repertoire and range of vocal possibilities: she really can do anything with her voice and was up for whatever we wanted to try!

The musicians of L’Arpeggiata are all extremely versatile and like to experiment. Malena adored that. She uses at least four different vocal techniques across the programme, and they all sound completely natural for her. Listening back to the recording it’s hard to believe that this is just one singer: on some tracks she sounds like a countertenor, on others like a folksinger, then there’s the higher florid Baroque repertoire, and finally the beautiful jazz standard ‘Nature Boy’ which closes the album.

That song is an old favourite of mine, and it has such a wonderful text: it’s about how life doesn’t have much meaning if you aren’t able to give or receive love, so I thought it was a perfect ending to our programme.

Did you notice any particular themes or motifs recurring across this very diverse programme?

The texts all speak about nature, and birds in particular are very present in songs and operas from the Baroque period. They often pop up in love-stories, either as the messenger of love or as the abandoned lover themself. Some of the purely instrumental pieces paint delightfully vivid pictures of birds, too – for instance, the portraits of the nightingale and the cuckoo in Biber’s Sonatas representivas, or of the chicken in Merula’s ‘La gallina’. We had a great time improvising all of those animal noises together: all fifteen musicians (including Malena) picked up percussion instruments to join in, including some crazy contraptions which you can turn to imitate the sound of a frog croaking!

We also have pieces depicting storms and the uproar of the sea, and a couple of charming little English ballads about other animals: ‘The Taylor and the Mouse’ and ‘The Frog and the Mouse’.

‘The Taylor and the Mouse’ might be familiar to some UK listeners from the beloved children’s TV programme Bagpuss – presumably that isn’t how you first heard it?!

How funny - I had no idea! I actually got to know it through Alfred Deller, who collected and recorded a lot of English folksongs. Three of the English dances on the album were published by John Playford in the seventeenth century, and part of the fun there lies in bringing the music to life when there’s hardly anything there on paper: as with a lot of folksong notations Playford just gives us the melody, without even a bass line. We’re very used to working with sources like that, and we had a great time experimenting and improvising to find something that sounds fresh and contemporary but still grounded in an understanding of that seventeenth-century style.

Did you discover any new repertoire along the way?

We included a couple of opera arias by composers like Gasparini and Bononcini, who were very popular in their own time but aren’t so well known today. The music only existed in manuscripts which were stored in Paris, so the arias were new to us all and we enjoyed performing them a lot. There’s always so much to choose from with all our programmes: every project starts with us collecting a lot of potential repertoire - maybe as many as a hundred songs - and then the biggest task is making the decisions! I’m always guided by the individual voices of the singers that I’ve invited, and of course my fantastic instrumentalists: the goal is to find the music which works best for everyone involved.

Do all of your players come from an early music background, or are some of them primarily folk-musicians?

They all come from a classical background: most of us studied at Schola Cantorum in Basel or Den Haag, or on equivalent early music programmes across Europe. But they’re all extremely versatile and can improvise in many different styles: it’s like being fluent in multiple languages. When we pick up repertoire like those English dance-pieces which have those traditional flavours, there’s a lot of discussion about whether it should it sound classically Baroque or more folky – we experiment with things like playing-style and ornamentation until we hit on something which really gives the music life.

Have any of the current players been involved with L’Arpeggiata from the very beginning?

My absolute favourite musician of all time is our cornetto player Doron Sherwin, whom I met when we were both studying in Basel in the 1980s. We were roommates for a while and spent all our time playing music together at the kitchen-table – forty years later we’re doing the same thing at concert-halls all over Europe, and the energy is unchanged!

The other regular players have come into my life at different stages, and I love that L’Arpeggiata is made up of several generations: we have some quite young players who bring their own ideas to the table, and they also love learning from older musicians who’ve been playing and improvising together for decades. The common factor is their sheer talent and versatility – and of course the courage to experiment!

What’s coming up for you in terms of live performances?

I’m in Salzburg right now, rehearsing Monteverdi’s Orfeo as part of the Mozartwoche. Rolando Villazón (who is the festival’s director) is singing Orfeo, and the stage director is the Austrian puppeteer Nikolas Habjan – the production incorporates puppets which are as big as the singers, if not bigger! The ferryman Caronte is a giant and the puppets of Orfeo and Euridice are both white, like the souls of the singers. It’s a beautiful show, and very moving.

The next big date in the diary is 8th February, when we have a double celebration in Paris: two concerts in one day! Firstly, we’re toasting twenty-five years of L'Arpeggiata’s existence, and it’s also my sixtieth birthday – I actually hate celebrating birthdays, but people insisted that I had to do something to mark this one! My friends are scattered all over the world, so the logistics were always going to be tricky…Eventually I decided to do what I like doing most in life: performing concerts with musical friends.

The 5pm concert will be a combination of two of our favourite programmes: La Tarantella (which came out in 2002 and really put us on the map) and Alla Napoletana (released in 2022). Then at 8.30 we’ll do a programme called La Festa d’Arpeggiata, which will involve a lot of special guests: Malena is making one of her epic train-journeys to be there and we’ll also have our wonderful dancer and choreographer Anna Dego, who devised and toured the Tarantella programme with us. It’s going to be a huge party!