by Paul Matheson

The Lammermuir Festival: ‘Lux Aeterna’ performed by The Gesualdo Six, directed by Owain Park

‘A sequence for the souls of the departed, to be heard by those who remember them’ is how Owain Park described the ‘Lux Aeterna’ programme performed by his award-winning vocal ensemble The Gesualdo Six in the beautiful church of Our Lady of Loretto in Musselburgh as part of this year’s Lammermuir Festival. The programme spanned a range of sacred choral music from the Renaissance: by Spanish composer Cristóbal de Morales (1500-1553), English Tudor composers Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) and William Byrd (1540-1623), the Franco-Flemish composer Orlande de Lassus (1532—1594) and Portuguese composer Vincente Lusitano (1520-1561). It also included contemporary compositions that explore the themes of death and consolation, by British composers John Tavener, Richard Rodney Bennet, Donna McKevitt, Joanna Marsh and Howard Skempton. Most of the pieces they performed can be found on their album ‘Lux Aeterna’, which was recorded in the appropriately named All Hallows’ Church in Gospel Oak, London.

The Gesualdo Six are regular performers at The Lammermuir Festival, which specialises in intimate concerts of chamber classical music in beautiful buildings across East Lothian. The core idea of the festival is that the locations showcase the majesty of the music, and vice versa. Our Lady of Loretto church was the perfect venue for The Gesualdo Six’s heartfelt rendition of choral music of bereavement and consolation. Six singers with angelically pure voices sang in front of the glowing, richly decorated church altar whose walls are covered in gold leaf artwork depicting events in the life of Jesus from the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. It was my first ever visit to Our Lady of Loretto: the figures on fields of gold were like Byzantine mosaics or the iconostasis of an Orthodox Church. Even the time of year was appropriate to the music: an autumnal chill in the air heralding shorter days, longer nights and the coming Feast of All Hallows.

The Gesualdo Six sang almost continuously for 90 minutes. The church was packed full. From the very first notes the audience were transfixed into awestruck silence by the ethereal beauty of the singing and by the deep respect with which The Gesualdo Six approached the music they were performing and the church in which they sang.

The concert opened with the mesmerizing, gripping ‘Parce mihi, Domine’ (‘Spare me, Lord’) by Cristóbal de Morales (c.1500-1553), taken from his Officium Defunctorum (The Office for the Dead), a prayer cycle for the repose of the soul of the departed. The Latin text is from the Book of Job 7:16-21: ‘Spare me, Lord, for my days are vanity. What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him? I have sinned; what shall I do unto thee, O thou preserver of men? And why dost thou not pardon my transgression, and take away my iniquity?’.

Morales’ setting of ‘Parce mihi, Domine’ is well-known through the best-selling ‘Officium’ CD by Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, which innovatively adds Garbarek’s alto saxophone to the human voice parts. The wail of the saxophone seems to express Job’s lamentation and the uncomprehending suffering of all mankind. The saxophone variation of ‘Parce Mihi, Domine’ is the version that one hears most often on the radio these days! But one has to say that the Garbarek/Hilliard collaboration was a very secular modern take on what was originally a devoutly Catholic composition.

Happily for those listening in Our Lady of Loretto on September 14th, The Gesualdo Six’s sensitive, meditative rendering of ‘Parce Mihi, Domine’ revealed the authentic emotion of this Renaissance Spanish masterpiece. In a gently unfolding series of hypnotically beautiful waves of music, their singing presented the successive questions of Job as an expression of humanity’s unceasing attempts to discern the Divine Will, and Man’s perennial yearning to be reunited with God. Job was a Prophet, and the Biblical Prophets were masters of religious discernment. It is no co-incidence that Cristóbal de Morales was a contemporary of Teresa of Ávila, the influential Spanish mystic. What Morales’s setting of Job 7:16-21 lets us hear is the Prophet Job using all his powers of discernment to try to penetrate the Veil of Divine Mystery that surrounds God’s purposes. Job understood that human beings are like uncomprehending children standing before the Creator that formed us, an insight echoed later by Saint Paul: ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known’ (1 Corinthians 13:11-12).

How, then, did Morales convey all of this in music? The Gesualdo Six director Owain Park helpfully explains in his excellent programme notes that ‘the music is bound together by a continuous thread: almost without exception each chord contains one note from the previous, knitting together the chordal texture. The questioning nature of the text is portrayed in music that gives a sense of slowly blinking, with repeated chords coming in and out of focus between silences’. The Gesualdo Six performance of ‘Parce Mihi, Domine’ lets us hear how Morales captured in music what Saint Augustine said in words: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You”.

The Gesualdo Six proceeded to sing the motet ‘Clamaverunt ad Dominum’ (‘They cried out to the Lord’) in which Orlande de Lassus explores Psalm 107’s themes of mortal fear and divine consolation, using dissonance to evoke the fear and harmonic progression and resolution to convey humanity’s passage to our desired haven.

The sacred motet ‘In ieiunio et fletu’ (‘In fasting and weeping’) composed by Thomas Tallis is a setting of Joel 2:12,17 from the liturgy for the First Sunday of Lent. The richly reverberant basso profundo bass line underscores a deeply prayerful and sombre setting of this Lenten text. The emotion in this composition may reflect the turbulence of the religious persecutions that Tallis lived through in 16th century England. Listening to it today makes one think of the current cataclysms in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and Sudan: ‘Between the porch and the altar the priests wept, saying Spare thy people’. Tallis’s final harmonic resolution hints at the possibility of salvation.

William Byrd’s sacred motet ‘Peccantem me quotidie’ (‘Sinning every day’) is also a setting of liturgy (a Respond from the Office of the Dead). Key phrases (‘sinning every day’, ‘not repenting’, ‘fear of death troubles me’, ‘save me’) are repeated multiple times across the different voices, each time culminating in a soaringly high counter-tenor iteration that utterly captures spiritual anguish. As the piece concludes, with the counter-tenor’s ascending ‘Salva me’ (‘Save me’) ringing in our ears, we are offered a glimpse of the prospect of eternal life.

Having begun the evening’s programme with Cristóbal de Morales’s ‘Parce Mihi, Domine’, it was fitting that the climax of the programme was the same composer’s ‘Lux Aeterna’ from his five-voice ‘Missa Pro Defunctis’ (‘Requiem Mass’). Morales begins with a solo voice singing the plainchant words ‘Lux Aeterna’ (‘Eternal light’) and then follows it with sumptuous polyphony of heartbreaking sweetness for the words ‘may it shine upon them, Lord, with your saints forever, for you are good’. Again, the solo plainchant words ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine’ (‘Grant them eternal rest, Lord’) is followed by a richly effulgent tapestry of intertwining voices singing the words ’et lux perpetua luceat eis’ (‘and may perpetual light shine upon them’). The effect is of transition from monochrome to colour, from candlelight to sunlight, from earth to heaven. Morales conveys in this music what scripture tells us in words: ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away’. (Matthew 5:4. Revelation 21:4).

Paul Matheson is a diversity officer with the police.

Photograph of Our Lady of Loretto, Musselburgh, by Paul Matheson.