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Iestyn Davies, counter-tenor; Fretwork
Iestyn Davies is a British countertenor widely recognised as one of the world’s finest singers, celebrated for the beauty and technical dexterity of his voice as well as for his impeccable musicianship. Simply put, he is one of the best countertenors in the world, performing regularly in lead roles at the world’s most important opera houses (the Metropolitan Opera, the Glyndebourne Festival, and Covent Garden). While widely respected as an opera singer, he is also valued as one of the finest interpreters of early and contemporary song repertoire. This concert highlights his work with English composer Michael Nyman and the songs of Henry Purcell, all accompanied by Fretwork, England’s celebrated viol consort. Expect bold harmonies, wondrous inventions, and melodies that will haunt your dreams – whether from the 17th century or the 21st.
Pre-concert talk with Iestyn Davies and Paolo Pietropaolo at 6:45PM
“His countertenor voice… is clear, effortless and warm. Cleanly executed ornamental figures emerge naturally from longer lyrical lines… The music hurtles through daring emotional shifts, with fiery outbursts one moment and achingly confused expressions the next. Mr. Davies sang it overwhelmingly.” – The New York Times
Presented in collaboration with Music on Main’s Modulus Festival
This concert is generously supported by Tony & Margie Knox and Ron Kruschen & Louise Akuzawa
To view/download this programme, please click here.
Programme
Michael Nyman
No Time in Eternity (2016)
Henry Purcell
Fantazy No. 7 in C minor (1680)
Fantazy No. 11 in G major (1680)
Music for a while
Nyman
Music after a While (2018)
Purcell
The Evening Hymn
INTERMISSION
Nyman
Balancing the books (1999)
If (1995)
Why (1995)
Purcell
Fantazy No. 6 in F major (1680)
Fantazy upon one note (1680)
Nyman
The Self-Laudatory Hymn of Innanna and her Omnipotence (1992)
Programme Notes
Michael Nyman at 75
Is there a contemporary composer whose music is more immediately recognisable than Michael Nyman? I can’t think of one: the insistent ostinanti, the bold, yet simply conceived harmony, the driving rhythms, the aggressive instrumentation, the heavy bass-line; all have combined to make his music instantly recognisable. He has been endlessly imitated, particularly by composers for moving images – film, TV, adverts and so on; yet these are pale imitations, not the real thing.
While he might be known now more for the music he wrote for Jane Campion’s award-winning film from 1993, The Piano, he initially shot to fame a decade earlier with the music for Peter Greenaway’s film The Draughtsman’s Contract, set in 17th century England. This lurid tale was filmed with striking originality, and Nyman mirrored this with his music, most of it derived from one of England’s greatest composers, Henry Purcell. Purcell’s music was well known to Nyman, as he had studied under the great musicologist Thurston Dart at King’s College in London in the 1960s, and had then produced the first modern edition of Purcell’s Catches in 1967.
So it was a natural choice to combine Nyman and Purcell on this disc. Purcell never composed vocal music with an accompaniment of viols, but his magnificent set of Fantazias and In Nomines for viols demonstrated his interest in the instrument; so it was but a short step to realising Purcell’s original bass line and completing the harmonies with parts for four or five viols. While all three in this programme are on ground basses – that is the same bass line repeated over and over again – each song presented different challenges.
O Solitude is a setting of the first and last stanzas (plus half of the third) of the poem La Solitude by Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant, translated by Katherine Philips, who was a remarkable literary figure in 17th century Wales and England. Its ground bass is unvarying, yet Purcell’s implied harmonies are exceptionally inventive.
The Evening Hymn is a setting of the poem by Bishop William Fuller, friend of the diarists Pepys and Evelyn. The arrangement for viols was made by Silas Wolston. The ground bass here moves to accommodate modulations to different keys, as does that of Music for a While, which is from the incidental music to Dryden and Lee’s translation of Sophocles’s play Oedipus, revived in 1692. Alecto is one of the Greek furies, with snakes for hair, whose work is to castigate mortals for their moral crimes.
In 2017, Fretwork commissioned Michael Nyman to write a new instrumental work for them, and he responded with Music After a While, which is based upon Purcell’s song, or more particularly upon its strikingly original bass-line, with its insidious rising chromatics. It was premiered in Milton Court, in London’s Barbican Centre in May 2018.
We had previously commissioned Nyman in 1992 to write a work for James Bowman and us for the Spitalfields Festival. Nyman described the chance encounter that led to the choice of text:
The text of the Self-Laudatory Hymn came to light while I was browsing among the bookshelves of an Armenian acquaintance in February 1992. Opening, for no apparent reason, a fat anthology entitled Ancient Near-Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, edited by James B. Pritchard, I found S N Kramer’s translation of this Hymn. I was immediately taken with its tone of unashamed self-congratulation (very suitable, I thought, for James Bowman’s voice) and its repetitive structure (very suitable for my music).
In conversation with another friend I learned that Inanna was not an obscure goddess known only to me and a few experts on Sumerian civilisation, but a central focus of that civilisation and a figure highly esteemed by feminists. In Kramer’s works: ‘Female deities were worshipped and adored all though Sumerian history…but the goddess who outweighed, overshadowed, and outlasted them all was a deity know to the Sumerians by the name of Inanna, ‘Queen of Heaven’, and to the Semites who lived in Sumer by the name of Ishtar. Inanna played a greater role in myth, epic, and hymn that any other deity, male or female.’
In the Self-Laudatory Hymn I have made no attempt to evoke Sumerian music (or music of any other period). The opportunity to work with the viols of Fretwork recalls my use of early instruments in the first Michael Nyman Band, which uses rebecs rather than viols; and also my studies in the 1960s with Thurston Dart (and his memorable Musica Britannica edition of Jacobean consort music) and the finest book ever written on English music, English Chamber Music by E H Meyer.
Some time during the 2000s, I came across Nyman’s song If, scored for piano and strings and thought it could work for viols – I made an arrangement and sent it to the composer, who approved. The calm simplicity of the harmonic pattern and melody makes for a compelling work, which expresses the child-like naïveté of the text. It was written, together with Why, to texts by Roger Pulvers as part of an animated film by Seiya Araki, The Diary of Anne Frank.
And then, having seen my arrangement, Nyman suggested I look at a work he had written for the Swingle Singers, Balancing the Books, a wordless vocal work in 8 parts. I arranged this then, but we didn’t find an opportunity to perform it until we were invited to take part in the Minimalism Unwrapped festival at Kings Place in London inn 2015.
No Time in Eternity was commissioned by the French counter-tenor Paulin Bündgen with Ensemble Celadon in 2016 and first performed by them in Lyon in March of that year. It is a setting of several poems by the great 17th century poet Robert Herrick: To Music, No Time in Eternity, Fortune, The Definition of Beauty, Things mortal still mutable, The Watch, To Music. All are from his Hesperides, published in 1648. His most famous verse is ‘To the Virgins to make much of time’, espousing the sentiment to seize the day, or carpe diem; and we see similar sentiments in these epigrammatical works that Nyman has chosen to set. He was highly sensitive to music and a close friend of the Lawes brothers, Henry & William.
Michael Nyman was born in Stratford, in the east end of London on 23rd March 1944. In addition to his current work as a composer, he is also a film maker, conductor, pianist, musicologist, writer & photographer. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music and, after his Ph.D studies with Thurston Dart, he went to Romania to collect folk music.
While working as music critic for The Spectator, he coined the term ‘minimalism’ in 1968. He also wrote for The New Statesman, The Listener and Studio International. He seminal work on new music – Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond – was published in 1974 and has recently been reprinted.
His preferred musical form is opera, and he has written several notable works in this form: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Facing Goya and Many and Boy: Dada.
More recently he has focused on composing soundtracks for silent films from the late 1920’s: Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice, Sergi Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and new soundtracks for three Dziga Vertov films- Man with a Movie Camera, The Eleventh Year and A Sixth Part of the World.
Richard Boothby
Iestyn Davies, counter-tenor
After reading Archaeology and Anthropology at St John’s College, Cambridge, Iestyn Davies studied at the Royal Academy of Music, London.
An esteemed Handelian, he has delighted audiences globally with his vocal agility and supreme musicianship in roles such as Bertarido, Orlando, Rinaldo, Ottone Agrippina and David Saul. Committed also to contemporary music, his intelligent and considered interpretations have led to fruitful collaborations with Thomas Adés, George Benjamin and Nico Muhly.
On the opera stage, he has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, New York; the Lyric Opera of Chicago; Teatro alla Scala Milan; the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; English National Opera; Glyndebourne Festival Opera; Welsh National Opera; Teatro Real Madrid; Salzburg Festival and in Munich, Vienna, and Zurich. Recent appearances include Arsace Partenope in Madrid, Ottone Agrippina in Hamburg and Munich, Bertarido Rodelinda for the Metropolitan Opera, and Ottone L’incoronazione di Poppea in Versailles.
Concert engagements have included performances at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan with Dudamel, the Concertgebouw and Tonhalle with Koopman and at the Barbican, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Lincoln Centre, Carnegie Hall and at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall with orchestras that include the New York Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, English Concert, Britten Sinfonia, Concerto Köln, Concerto Copenhagen, Ensemble Matheus, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Academy of Ancient Music and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. In the 2022/23 season, Iestyn appeared in concerts at Carnegie Hall with Bernard Labadie, the Berlin Philharmonie with Emmanuelle Haim, and at the Barbican in a world premiere production of music by Dowland with lutenist Thomas Dunford, staged by Netia Jones.
In the 2023/24 season, opera highlights include Tolomeo Cesare at Opéra National de Paris and Oberon A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Atlanta Opera and at Garsington Opera. In concert he joins Les Violons du Roy for Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra for Benjamin’s Written on Skin conducted by George Benjamin, the English Concert for Bertarido Rodelinda on tour to the United States and Asia, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra for a solo Bach programme on tour in Australia.
An outstanding recitalist, he has performed in Vienna, Tokyo, Paris, and New York in repertoire ranging from Dowland to Clapton. He is a regular favourite at London’s Wigmore Hall and Kings Place where he has curated residencies.
His recital discs have won three Gramophone Awards, and he performed on the Grammy-winning recording of Thomas Adès’s The Tempest. He is the recipient of a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and was nominated for an Olivier Award for his singing role in Farinelli and the King opposite Mark Rylance (premiered at London’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and transferring to the West End and Broadway). In 2017 he was awarded an MBE by the Queen for his services to music.
Fretwork
“Fretwork is the finest viol consort on the planet” – Stephen Pettitt, The London Evening Standard.
Fretwork has been around for getting on for 40 years, performing music old and new, and look forward to a challenging and exciting future as the world’s leading consort of viols.
They have expanded their repertory to include music from over 500 years, from the first printed consort music in Venice in 1501 to music written this year. And, in between, everything that can be played on a consort of viols – Byrd & Schubert, Purcell & Shostakovitch, Gibbons & Britten, Dowland & Grieg.
While they used to fly all over the globe, they have now committed to reducing their carbon footprint by travelling in Europe only by train or electric cars – recently, they have toured Germany, France, Spain, Austria & Slovenia in their two Teslas.
The future sees many exciting projects based on the thrilling juxtaposition of old and new; making the experience of old music new and bringing the sensibilities of past ages to bear on contemporary music
