BACKSTAGE WITH…
Conductor Christopher Monks
Armonico Consort’s ‘Big Byrd’ concert on 28 January will be celebrating the great British composer’s 400th anniversary later this year. How will you be doing that?
It won’t be just Byrd. Byrd’s music was never intended to be heard from beginning-to-end in one concert, so that’s not a genuine way of sharing it with an audience. There’s also so much music of that period where composers were either inspired by or directly inspired other composers – we know that they were constantly travelling across Europe, and that’s how they were influenced by music of other nations. And so, for instance, we’ll be beginning the concert with Josquin’s Inviolata in 12 parts – an extremely rarely performed work – and then I wanted to really strip things back to basics with Byrd’s Mass for Four Parts. It’s a great opportunity for us to perform it and our audiences to hear it, especially the Credo, which is the most magical moment but rarely gets sung even in a liturgical context these days.
The audience won’t just be hearing music sung on a stage directly in front of them, though, will they?
No. With a lot of this repertoire, the original audience wouldn’t have seen the music being sung at all, or it would have been sung around the building – at both the back and the front, in the gallery and so on. So to be absolutely genuine, that’s how we’ve decided to approach it, just as we have done before with our Supersize Polyphony series of concerts. These composers had such a sense of adventure and challenge, and I wanted to recreate that real feeling of spatial music.
Talking of ‘supersize’, Ockeghem’s Deo Gratias is scored for 36 parts. Will you be enlisting help?
Yes, we are going to be joined by a number of university choral scholars, including from the Instituto Superior de Música Esperanza Azteca (ISMEA) in Puebla, Mexico, where we have been working on a project. Plus I’ve also been looking for a way to incorporate our 15- to 18-year-old AC Academy scholars into a concert without it affecting the professional texture of the sound. This piece is perfect for that, and we will be creating an extraordinary undulation of harmony that surrounds and swathes the audience in the most mesmeric manner. And again, at the end of the concert, we’ll be singing Josquin’s Qui Habitat, which is ideal for this type of performance.