Concerto delle Donne
Review: Limited Edition – The magazine for
Buckinghamshire – February 2006
Alice Eaton meets a group of musicians who
travelled from High Wycombe to France in search of perfect recording.
Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Music for the Virgin Mary
Concerto delle Donne
Signum Classics SIGCD073
With
high street music stores positively bulging with recordings by a plethora of
musicians and musical groups all competing for shelf space, you could be
forgiven for assuming that producing an album of classical music is an easy
process.
However,
this not the case, as I discovered when I visited the High Wycombe home of
professional musicians Gill and Alastair Ross, who this month are releasing a
new CD by their group Concerto Delle Donne.
Unlike
the golden years when CDs first came about and music producers were falling
over themselves to get musicians into the studio and onto the shelves before
their competition, the trend in recent years has seen record companies
distancing themselves from the whole process, often refusing to put the money
behind a project until the production side has been done and dusted. This ca
make it a risky and expensive task for any performer , or orchestra for that
matter, wanting to release a record. Even the London Symphony Orchestra has
been forced to finance their recordings themselves.
So, what
is it like for a small, independent group such as Concerto Delle Donne to get a
CD produced ?
Gill and
Alastair, who formed the group in 1991 with the aim of researching and
performing early Italian and French music, were forced to remortgage their home
when the funding they were going to receive to make their album fell through.
“ Making
a recording today is an uphill battle “, explains Alastair, who, with his wife
Gill, regularly performs with some of the world’s top early music groups
including The Academy of Ancient Music and the City of London Sinfonia.
“ It is
not that we want to make money from this. We are really passionate about the
project and we wanted to perform and record this music because we love it “.
But the
financial issue is not the only obstacle musicians have to overcome when making
a CD. The key to success, Alastair tells me, is to find a theme that sets you
apart from the rest. And their CD, Music for the Virgin Mary – celebrating 300
years of Charpentier, certainly has that.
The
recording features music by the great French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier
(1643-1704) written for the nuns of Le Port Royal, a convent in the centre of
Paris.
Alastair
discovered the music, orchestrated for three solo sopranos, a choir of a
further six sopranos and organ at La Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He
immediately set about translating it into modern notation in order to perform
and record the beautiful melodies he had found.
“ This
music has been performed by a French group but they are hardly known in the Uk
and I don’t believe any British group has performed or recorded it “, explains
Alastair.
“ I knew,
if we were going to do something like this and compete with other recordings on
the market; the only way to set us apart and, more importantly, to do justice
to the music, was to achieve a sound that was a close to original as possible
“.
So where
better to hold the recording than back in the country the music has come from ?
Fired with their ambitious project, Alastair and Gill, together with a team of
singers and a recording engineer, set sail across the channel in June last year
to the beautiful church of Notre-Dame, Rozay en Brie, where Alastair had found
an historic organ from 1690, played by the great François Couperin, that he
believed would be perfect for the music.
“ It was
very exciting as this organ, unlike many that had been modernised in the 19th
century, had been left untouched and was still in its original form apart from
some careful restoration in the 30th and the 90th. The
instrument has a very nasal sound, as it would have sounded. It was quite
uncomfortable to play because people were much smaller in 1690 and, by the end
of four days of recording, my back was really aching “.
I was
treated to a preview snippet of the recording and it really is beautiful. As
the nuns were not trained musicians and were performing purely as a way of
emphasising their devotion to God, the musical lines in the music are
hauntingly simple, accentuated by the unusual use of only sopranos with a
simple organ accompaniment. The result sends shivers up to the spine.
The CD
contains the Antiphon Ave Regina Caelorum, the Magnificat pour le Port Royal,
Th Christmas Cantata in Nativitate, and the Stabat Mater pour les Religieuses.
Some additional organ music by Nicolas-Antoine Lebègue (c.1631-1702) and
Guillaume Gabriel Nivers (c.1632-1714) was included to give Alastair an
opportunity to explore the vivid colours of the organ.
Churchgoers
at Notre-Dame are fiercely proud of their organ and turned out in force to hear
a performance by Concerto Delle Donne at the end of their recording sessions.
The group will be performing back on British soil when they launch the CD at a
concert at St John’s, Smith Square, London on February 16.
Music
for the Virgin Mary is released by Signum Records.
For more
information on the group, visit www.concertodelledonne.com.
Checkout www.orgue-rozay.org for more
information on the Rozay organ.