Owain Park on Radiant Dawn

Taking its title from one of the great 'O' Advent Antiphons - and from MacMillan's popular setting of the same text - the latest album from The Gesualdo Six sees them join forces with trumpeter Matilda Lloyd for another of their trademark concept programmes - linked by subtle themes and connections that aren't always easy to pin down in words, but which always create a coherent and compelling whole. 

In the broadest sense, 'Radiant Dawn' is about light and shade, dawn and dusk. Moving easily and fluidly between the sacred and the secular, it includes works from the twelfth century (represented by St Hildegard of Bingen) up to the twenty-first (with compositions from living composers such as Alec Roth, Deborah Pritchard and of course MacMillan) and unites the vocal sextet's sound with the unique sonority of the trumpet. 

The Gesualdo Six's director Owain Park shares some of his thoughts on this programme.

This is your fourth album dealing with some variant on the ‘darkness and light’ theme. What is it that keeps you coming back to this idea?

It's a rich vein. It's what works well in a live performance environment - people come through the door for it. When we record, we want to showcase some of the best of what we do live, and then people will want to buy and listen to the recordings! It's a reflection of a lot of the music that we do in concert.

A lot of it taps into the liturgical music that we grew up singing and associated ourselves with, and that we want to bring along with us - even if we perhaps reflect on it through a more secular narrative. It's trying to celebrate the composers who are setting similar texts and themes that have been done for many hundreds of years, but trying to draw them together.

Fading came into being with that Compline-influenced angle to it, and I liked the structure and the journey of that. The concert programme now bears little resemblance to the CD, but we still do it a lot - we try to keep it fresh while also enjoying the familiarity of some of the journeys that we take with it. 

So the concert programmes have that same narrative of travelling from point A to point B?

Sometimes. It depends, really. With the other albums like Lux Aeterna and Morning Star... the former is much more focused on mourning and loss, but then with that comes that idea of eternal light, and it's good to celebrate colour and light rather than just darkness. A lot of our programmes could just be quite slow and thickly polyphonic works all the way through, so I like the idea that we find a bit more contrast with it. 

The journeys that we go on in a concert really vary; more recently on a tour we finished a programme with A Good-Night by Richard Rodney Bennett, which we'd recorded before in a different programme. It's not so much that we arrive at the other end, more that we come full circle. And I do try on these albums, where possible, to make it so that people can listen to it in any order, but that it can work cyclically. If you're in the car, for instance, and you forget to turn it off...!

St Hildegard's monophonic chant is pretty well-known nowadays – recordings have been highlighting her music since about the ‘80s onward. But she seems to stand alone, like a kind of lighthouse – what is it about her music that is so unique? Did she leave a legacy through any musical pupils?

Well, we've recorded some of her music before - previously with a drone added, which is a lovely effect, but I liked the simplicity of just the solo voice. Several tracks on the album feature solo voices, for example the plainchant that comes between the verses of the Robert White. So it's trying to give that a little bit more of its own place. And her writing is obviously different from that plainchant style. Those characteristic cadence points which always have a feeling that she's got something more to say, leading into the next phrase. And her use of tessitura as well, that's very expressive in the way it builds up and up and up towards a certain point before melting back down again. 

As for a legacy... I imagine that there were other people writing but that it doesn't survive, or hasn't been discovered. Some of these manuscripts and surviving records are really hard to get hold of in the first place. There's an element of luck involved there; perhaps if we looked a bit harder now, we could find some more stuff. And we'd certainly be really keen to do it.

There was a time when Hildegard was the only female composer in the concert programme for a lot of people, which thankfully is no longer the case - but there's a special place for her music, particularly in conjunction with plainchant. We do that in concerts too - a solo piece that transitions into something else, and often we use a little bit of movement then as well, to tease the audience into following the music to somewhere else in the building. 

What was it like incorporating Matilda Lloyd into some of these tracks – taking on one of the vocal lines in polyphonic works, yet needing to blend with the rest of the ensemble?

Musically, in those pieces, it's a different part, fulfilling a different role to the other voices. In the Robert White it's the cantus firmus which in other settings might be found in the middle of the texture rather than on the top. In Byrd's setting of the same text, for instance, he transitions it from the bass up to the high voice - whereas White just sits it on the top. I've always found that when there are voices doing that, and particularly in the even higher keys, the words become less important in that top line and much more important in the voices.

So then if it's not about the words, then what is it about? The sound? Trying to make the plainchant stand out? It does the latter naturally, simply because the trumpet has a different timbre from the voice, but I do think (and this is something she's been developing with us over the last few years) that Matilda has a way of playing that makes it work with the voices. So it does sound different, but it's more than just a trumpet and some voices. There's a little bit more of an overlap. 

So not like the Hilliard Ensemble’s Officium with Jan Garbarek, with the saxophone very much separate from the voices?

Exactly. Though that's an incredible album, of course. We wanted to be collaborative and to develop our musical styles to come closer together.

With my cynic’s hat on… The King’s Singers recently collaborated with two sopranos in order to, among other things, allow them to perform Vaughan Williams’s magical Shakespeare Songs. Was there an element of this in working with Matilda – letting you access works that sit outside the range of an all-male group?

Not really, actually - other than the tracks that require a trumpet to function, there's not really anything on there that we wouldn't do ourselves. We might put it down a bit - we've put the Robert White down a tone - but we have still done it. It was more about doing something musically interesting, and the commissioning side of it.

And also the performative side of it - the first time we did this programme, in 2018, we were developing a lot of the concerts ourselves rather than being booked for them, so we were going back to a lot of the same places. And that meant we had to come up with new programmes that would entice audience members to come out every three or four months rather than once a year or two! It was a case of seeing what we could do that would be interesting to people, and also a desire to expand our repertoire and work with a couple of different composers.

Burgon’s Nunc dimittis is a funny piece – along with Goodall’s Psalm 23 it’s about the only piece of liturgical music that’s primarily associated with television! What makes it tick? In particular, how do you smooth over those unique tonal shifts between phrases?

The texture shifts - we're accompanying a voice to start with, and then the trumpet, so that feels like there are two 'zones' if you like. And that kind of harmonic language is something that we're very accustomed to, right through from Monteverdi and Gesualdo. It's certainly not a prepared shift in any way, but that's in a way the beauty of it. You need to be able to already be imagining the G major section while you're singing a section in F major, the home key, and vice versa. You're prepared for the shift in that sense.

And then when it comes to the final resting-place of A major, having travelled further away, it's the most satisfying of all. At the beginning you wouldn't feel like that was a natural destination for it, but Burgon sets up these shifts and therefore going one further does feel right at the end.

What’s next for you? Looking at your discography to date, it seems like we’re due for a more strictly early-music album to balance the more wide-ranging ‘concept’ albums such as this and 2023’s Morning Star – are you going to keep those two strands going in parallel?

Nearly! The next one that's been recorded is called Wishing Tree, which is more about nature, love, songs from childhood and that kind of thing brought together. Part of the reason for that is that it's something I've always wanted to record, but until recently we'd only done it as a summer programme. We've found, though, that more and more promoters have been interested in taking that repertoire on, particularly if the concert is in a recital hall or at any rate not in a church. It felt like the right next move.

Beyond that it'll definitely be an early music disc, that'll be our twelfth. At the moment we're at the stage of working out where we record our CDs - there are lots of lovely options available, so that's the next challenge. 

Wishing Tree sounds like it's going to be more secular than your recordings hitherto?

Much more. There is a piece by David Bednall that is a sacred piece, the story of the fishermen filling the nets, and that has a little plainchant backdrop to it - that will go early in the programme alongside a piece of Byrd, and smooth the transition. Continuing from where we left off but then going in a new direction.