Jonathan talks to us about picking up the baton (ho ho) from his predecessor, and about the ways that the sacred works of Bruckner and Gesualdo complement each other across a gap of many centuries. As he explains, the seemingly incongruous elephant in the room - Wagner's arrangement of Palestrina - is actually something of a crux around which the whole concept of the programme revolves and comes together.
How does it feel, stepping into John Eliot Gardiner’s shoes at the helm of the choir?
The first project that I conducted with the choir was last June, Bach motets and things by the Bach family with solo violin, with Kati Debretzeni in London, and with Isabelle Faust in Leipzig at the Bachfest, which is a festival that I'm quite close to through Solomon's Knot - and that initially came about because John Eliot recommended us to the festival, about ten years ago. So that's come full circle in a way.
This Bruckner-Gesualdo project was recorded in September and October, so that's the second thing, and since then this position of Choir Director has been created, and they very kindly asked me to do that. And before that I'd been a singer in the choir for nearly ten years. So yes, impossible shoes to fill - and I'm not filling them on my own, which is good. There's a team of other conductors who are leading different repertoire streams and different projects. I'm the Choir Director and taking responsibility particularly for that, and conducting a couple of projects every season. I'm doing the Edinburgh Festival this year, with Tavener's Veil of the Temple which we're participating in, and then our own concert with Handel's Dixit Dominus and Bach motets and things with the English Baroque Soloists.
So those are the projects I'm solely responsible for, and then everything else that happens with the choir I will prepare the choir for, and rehearse them at the beginning of those projects and make sure that there is continuity - if you have very different conductors coming in like, say, Masaaki Suzuki and Pablo Heras-Casado, they will want different things, but on the other hand, I think the choir should have a consistent personality and a consistent profile, and the idea is that that's provided by me.
The recording itself is bigger forces than I was expecting, and bigger than is usual these days - is that part of your vision for the choir in general?
No... ordinarily we'd match the forces to the repertoire and to the venues. The project of this particular disc is built very much around the forces required for the Bruckner, and then that means the whole thing becomes cast in the frame of a nineteenth-century historical concert. Obviously a lot of people these days would do Gesualdo with just five singers - so it's more in the ballpark of this 'Wagner's approach to Palestrina' sort of thing. Gesualdo as he might have been performed and heard in Bruckner's time. In that sense I certainly don't think the choir's oversized.
This is the thing that will raise a few eyebrows - people will be wondering why we're singing Gesualdo with such a big choir - but the concept is to bring these two repertoires closer together, through the lens of a nineteenth-century aesthetic. Though at the same time I've tried to bring in as much as possible from the more Renaissance approach to singing - even into the Bruckner. There's a lot of clarity in Bruckner, and really good tuning helps his choral music a lot.
So with the two extremities of the repertoire here, I've tried to make them inform each other. It's maybe a far-flung idea, but my concept is that they speak to each other, there's a kind of dialogue that in a way eradicates any historical distance, and that people should be able to listen through the disc without really knowing who's who or what's what - just letting the music speak on its own terms and perhaps finding unexpected parallels.
The opening track of this album made me do something of a double take. What was it about Palestrina’s Stabat Mater that so grabbed Wagner’s attention that he felt moved to arrange it - and how much did he change it?
This particular piece he very much admired - he performed it in a historical concert in Dresden in 1848, the revolutionary year, and he performed Mozart symphonies and I think also Bach's Singet dem Herrn at the end of the concert. It was set in that context. He wasn't really involved in the actual Cecilian Movement, and this arrangement predates it a bit anyway - but he's obviously part of this looking back and upholding examples from the past. He makes this quasi-HIP argument saying that we know this piece had a powerful effect when performed in Holy Week in Rome, and that all he's done in his edition is to write in the necessary articulation and other elements to bring that back to life.
He's not really changed a single note of the piece itself, but he's scored it for soloists, semichorus (with and without soloists) and tutti, in the double choirs, and he's added a plethora of articulation and dynamics, ritardandi and so on - he's basically telling the conductor how to do it, with the idea that if they perform it this way then it'll have the effect which it used to have, and should have.
And that ties so many things together in this album; Bruckner worshipped Wagner (as many people did), and in Bruckner's motets on this disc you hear that as well. A lot of it is quite clean and classical, but then there are bits that aren't. There's this conflict - or, again, perhaps a dialogue - between on the one hand the Cecilian ideals, which are purity, clarity, Palestrina etc, and on the other hand Gesualdo, who for me represents something more dirty and sinful. And Bruckner oscillates between those two.
The reason the juxtaposition of Wagner and Palestrina might cause that kind of double take is because it is on the face of it utterly incongruous; two composers who we really wouldn't put together on a disc. But Wagner and Palestrina in some ways represent the two poles in Bruckner's music. He was very close to the Cecilian movement, and to people who were very strong proponents of it. And there is one piece of Bruckner which famously he did write absolutely 100% in Cecilian style and dedicated it to one of the leaders of the movement, which is Os justi. But everything else he writes is infected by what you might call Wagnerian chromaticism. Like he's got that little angel and little devil on each shoulder, telling him to write like Palestrina but then also to stretch the boundaries and push the harmony to its limits.
Out of Bruckner’s motets, by far the best-known is Locus iste with Christus factus est in a solid second place. But why those two? Locus iste might be fairly texturally simple and approachable, but then so is Os justi (which I think is absolutely spine-tingling and should be performed more often), whereas Christus factus est is really kind of tricky to properly do justice to. And the Ave Maria, too, should get more love than it does…
It certainly strikes me that the Ave Maria is in a very similar frame to Locus iste - it's got that sort of purity to it, redolent of certain TV series' end credits music, that sort of thing! And Os justi is an absolute blinder of a piece that is probably my favourite, and certainly I think comes over really well on this recording. It definitely deserves to be as popular as Christus factus est.
It's surprising how few motets there actually are - it's part of this weird conundrum about Bruckner. Obviously there are people who are fans of the symphonies, and that's why I think the motets are so interesting - to show that other side of him. The miniaturist. We all know he was such a great organist but actually almost no organ music survives at all. We wove some of it into this programme when we did it in concert, but they're not very long and there aren't very many of them.
Do you think Gesualdo’s lurid life-story (the fact that he was a murderer is hard to overlook!) has coloured how we think about his music and given it an extra frisson of outlandishness that goes beyond just his bold harmonic writing?
I would say that the sacred motets are less extreme than the madrigals, so that's one aspect of it - though I did try to choose the motets that have the most wacky bits.
But I think you're right, too - we can't un-think that element of him. There are moments in the pieces on this disc when he's saying 'spare me' and similar sentiments, talking about staring Hell in the face - at the end of Peccantem me quotidie (a great text - 'I am sinning daily and not repenting') where he's pleading to God to spare him - and you can't avoid seeing him kneeling down in front of the crucifix and flagellating himself. That is undeniably there in the music as well. It's extreme, it's tormented - but I think the idea that he was a total outlier amongst his contemporaries is a bit of a red herring.
Yes, we tend to think of Gesualdo as this unique, even freakish, figure - but how much does he really stand alone, stylistically? Were other composers starting to push the boundaries of harmony in his time, and did anyone pick up the baton and write similarly contorted polyphony after his death?
It's people like Marenzio, Giaches de Wert, Cipriano de Rore - the anguish built into this music, and the harsh dissonance, is certainly present in the genre already. It's not how strong his dissonances are that is the striking thing - it's these 'cut' moments where he will juxtapose blocks of completely different keys. And also the way he will travel extremely quickly to a very distant harmony, just through a couple of pivots that suddenly take you somewhere completely different. The bewildering and alienating effect of that isn't something that I hear in very much music; you hear a lot of very pained dissonance, but those really abrupt ruptures are really where he is most striking.
It's another thing that feeds back into Bruckner; Bruckner's default mode of writing is homophony - essentially all his motets start with a simple chordal statement, and then things will get more complicated with counterpoint and dissonance. In Gesualdo it's the other way round; apart from O vos omnes, he's always starting with the voices entering one after another, contrapuntally, and then he'll just stop everything and have a new, chordal entry which grabs you - usually on a chord plucked out of nowhere.
So there's this conversation between those two techniques - between the way Gesualdo uses chordal homophony to stop you in your tracks and the way for Bruckner it’s more of his safe place. The same technique being used for opposite effects.
As you’ll be well aware, the London choral scene is a crowded place. If you had to sum up in one of those ‘elevator pitch’-style short pithy statements what makes the Monteverdi Choir particularly stand out, what would your pitch be?
I would say that the Monteverdi Choir is a hand-picked team of soloist ensemble singers - many of them - and the fact that so many of them could step right out of the choir and sing a solo aria in a Passion or something speaks to the sheer quality of the singers there. And that enables a virtuosity, an emotional and intellectual capacity, which for me makes the choir really leap out at you. It's not a choir of crystalline perfection and close-miked beauty - it's something more raw and honest than that, and that's certainly what I look for in working with the choir. A deep sense of understanding the meaning of what is being said, and sung, and through all the technical virtuosity that hits home with the audience that they're singing to.
That's what makes the Monteverdi Choir something very special for me. Many other things, of course - utter commitment to text, kaleidoscopic range of colour, a real resource of power - it's a very special group and it's a real privilege for me to be able to work with them.
Monteverdi Choir, Jonathan Sells
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