by Paul Matheson

UNSUNG HEROINE - VISION by THE TELLING (First Hand Records FHR123

This generous CD (74 minutes long) contains songs and music from two acclaimed concert-plays by the Early Music performance group, The Telling. The album carries a particular poignancy because it was released as a memorial to The Telling’s multi-talented mezzo-soprano and harpist Ariane Prüssner, who died tragically from undiagnosed lung cancer in May 2021. Unsung Heroine/Vision contains the final recordings of Ariane’s splendid and deeply engaging singing.

The first half of the album is the music from The Telling’s concert-play ‘Vision’ about the extraordinary life of the 12th century visionary medieval abbess Saint Hildegard of Bingen. The second half is a selection of the courtly-love songs of the 12th/13th century Troubadours and Trouveres of Provence and Northern France, including ballads by the female poets Beatriz de Dia and Blanche de Castille.

The structure of this album reminds me of an Indian music concert that I attended in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall some years ago, when the master percussionist Zakir Hussain and his ensemble performed a programme with the Indian classical music maestro and santoor player Pandit Shivkumar Sharma. The first half was a solemn and reverential performance of classical Indian raga music, with its sacred associations. After the interval the programme moved to secular, rhythmic Indo-Jazz compositions. This album of 12th/13th century medieval music is structured in the same way: we begin with the sacred mystical poetry and music of Saint Hildegard, and then move to the secular love songs of the French troubadours.

Mystical poetry

The opening piece O Euchari in Leta Via delightfully contrasts the timbre, pitch and texture of Clare Norburn’s soprano voice with Ariane Prüssner’s mezzo-soprano voice. When I hear their two contrastive female voices singing plainchant lines like ‘you walked upon the road of the blessed when you stayed with the Son of God; you touched the man and saw his miracles’, I sense in my imagination the women who were amongst the first followers of Jesus.

Abbess Hildegard’s mystical poetry is evocative, vivid, passionate and heady, as the plainchants selected here show. Consider the lyrics of O Rubor Sanguinis (‘O ruby blood’): ‘O ruby blood which flowed from Him on high who divinity touched. You are a flower that the winter of the breath of the serpent can never harm’.

Or the lyrics of Ave Generosa (‘Hail, noble girl’): ‘For a holy flood poured into you as heaven’s Word was clothed in flesh in you. You are the sweet lily upon which God has fixed his gaze before all other creatures. How deep is God’s delectation in you, when He encircled you in his heat so that his Son was suckled by you’.

I was very excited when I saw that this album includes the Hildegard chant that first made me fall in love with medieval plainchant as a young man. ‘Columba Aspexit’ (‘The dove peeped in’) was the opening track on the groundbreaking 1982 recording ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’ by the vocal ensemble Gothic Voices with soprano Emma Kirkby. I wondered how The Telling’s rendition would compare to Emma Kirkby’s legendary recording.

In The Telling’s arrangement, Ariane takes lead vocal, with accompaniment by Clare’s supporting vocal and Jean Kelly’s medieval harp. Ariane’s richly textured mezzo-soprano voice is strikingly different from Emma Kirkby’s ethereal soprano. Emma’s 1982 rendition brought to mind the image of the ‘feather on the breath of God’. Whereas Ariane’s deeper voice makes me visualise Abbess Hildegard herself: it sounds like a voice of deep wisdom and experience.

As Clare Norburn writes in the CD’s accompanying booklet, ‘the language of both Hildegard’s text and music is complex and highly personal. Her music is linked to her visions.….much of it is effectively the final outpouring of her visionary three-volume work SCIVIAS, her major work which she wrote over ten years in her 40s….when she finally overcomes her fears and is compelled to speak of her visons, rather than suppressing and denying them a voice, as she did throughout her early life’. When I listened to Ariane sing Columba Aspexit, it was very easy to imagine Abbess Hildegard singing the same chant.

Courtly love

The second half of the CD contains courtly love songs of the troubadours, sung by Clare and Ariane with accompaniment by Joy Smith on medieval harp and percussion, and Giles Lewin on vielle and bagpipes. Some of these troubadour ballads are rhythmic dance songs like Kalenda Maia (‘May Day’) by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (1180-1207) and Ce fu en Mai (‘It was in May’) by Moniot D’Arras, the 13th century monk and trouvere. These songs are still sung nowadays by French folk groups and singers.

A key poetic idea within the medieval Fin Amor (courtly love) tradition is that love is at its purest when its object is not attainable in this life. This album includes a famous example of Fin Amor expressed in the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn’s ballad Can vei la lauzetta mover (‘When I see the lark’):

‘Alas! How much of love I thought I knew and how little I know,

For I cannot stop loving her from whom I may have nothing.

All my heart, and all herself, and all my own self and all I have

She has taken from me and leaves me nothing but longing and a seeking heart.’

The troubadour notion of the sublimity of loving ‘pure and chaste from afar’ meant that it was a natural progression to compose courtly love ballads in praise of Our Lady. One thinks of the medieval Cantigas de Santa Maria and the pilgrim songs in the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat. A good example on this album is Amours, u trop tart me suis pris (‘Love, to which I have been drawn recently’) attributed to Blanche de Castille (1188-1252) who became Queen of France.

‘Love, to which I have been drawn recently, has instructed me by its nobility,

Sweet lady of paradise, I want to sing a song to you:

To achieve everlasting joy, it is you one should serve and love.

Virgin queen, flower of the lily’.

This album is a valuable record of two fine play-concerts about two remarkable medieval women. It is also a precious memorial to a remarkable contemporary woman. Ariane, we still miss you.

Eternal rest grant unto her O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace

Paul Matheson is a music reviewer and diversity officer with the police