A ravishing musical tribute to the genius of Leonardo da Vinci
Yet again, the eight-strong vocal ensemble named after those little beans that come with tuna in Italian restaurants have come up with a “concept” programme that stirs the mind and heart, illuminates the past, and ravishes the ear.
What prompted this particular concept was the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, an occasion that musical director Robert Hollingworth marked not with a brisk canter through the music Leonardo might have heard, but something much more imaginative. Together with renowned Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp, he devised a programme of music, imagery and words that explored Leonardo’s own creative obsessions, and reflected them in music that sometimes hailed from his own time, but often didn’t.
The two wore their learning lightly, Kemp pointing out interesting details in the paintings displayed on the screen above, Hollingworth drawing parallels with the music that was always apt and imaginatively suggestive.
One of those obsessions was music. Leonardo was a mean player on the lira da braccio (a bowed instrument held on the shoulder), but what really fascinated him about music was its “incorporeal” properties of number, proportion and pattern. Music could offer these things in a play of pure abstract sound, unburdened by the requirement to represent anything – unlike painting. As examples of musical
references in Leonardo, Kemp displayed a close-up of the intricate embroidery on the Mona Lisa’s frock, and the flecks of starlight in the crystal ball held in the hand of the Christ – an oblique reference to the “music of the spheres” – as shown in the Salvator Mundi, which sold recently for $450million. Meanwhile, the choir sang the first fugue from Bach’s Art of Fugue with delicate, translucent beauty of tone, and the even more elaborate Agnus Dei from Josquin’s Mass on the folk song L’homme Armé.
Then there was the peculiar way Leonardo blended spiritual love and eroticism, as revealed in what Kemp called his “sexy and yet curiously sexless” portrait of John the Baptist, and, of course, the Mona Lisa. For these, Hollingworth daringly chose two ravishingly beautiful settings of words from the Song of Songs by Jean-yves Daniel-lesur, a French composer who was always overshadowed by Messiaen – unfairly, as this made clear.
It wasn’t all high-minded. Leonardo liked to create outlandishly grotesque faces, to which Orazio Vecchi’s rumbustious musical portrayal from 1597 of a wedding feast with largerthan-life guests seemed the perfect counterpoint. The singers hammed it up splendidly, as they did the battle noises in Clément Janequin’s La Guerre of 1528, which went with images of Leonardo’s war machines. But ultimately, Leonardo loved music because it revealed a world beyond the senses, and in the final newly composed piece, Adrian Williams’s hushed, awestruck Shaping the Invisible, that sense of reaching out to something unseen was made vividly real.
On tour. Details: leonardo.ifagiolini.com; I Fagiolini’s CD Leonardo: Shaping the
Invisible is released on the Coro label