When I found out that Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble were coming to Gloucester as part of the Cheltenham Music Festival, I knew I had to be there.
It was a special concert, with the spaces of the cathedral proving ideally suited to the music. For once, there was a virtue in sitting in the cheap seats with extremely restricted views. The music washed over me as I gazed at pillars, arches and vaulting. It seemed the sound of the stones, timeless. One piece followed on from another, almost seamlessly, so the spell was unbroken.
The programme notes recalled the initial reactions to the collaboration between a renowned early music group and jazz saxophonist: a collaboration which on paper should not have worked. The Herald Tribune described the first recording, Officium, as ‘Sobering and soaring, ice-warm, as it were. And the texture is so enveloping that you don’t want to listen to anything less pure than Bach or Billie Holiday afterward.’
The release of Officium roughly coincided with the rise in popularity of contemporary music with a spiritual dimension (John Tavener, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt) that was played seemingly endlessly by commercial classical music radio stations in the 1990s. The work is more challenging than this suggests, though, with some of the music taking a distinctly atonal flavour.
It is still the version of Morales’s Parce mihi, Domine that for me is the most moving and this was performed at the heart of the concert. Ice-warm, indeed: there is a containment here. Unlike, say, an aria by Puccini, it does not grab the listener and say, ‘I am going to move you’. The four-part choral singing is restrained, unobtrusive. Over this, the soprano saxophone floats, sometimes reflective, sometimes insistent. In Seamus Heaney’s wonderful phrase, it ‘catch[es] the heart off guard, and blow[s] it open’.
The concert ended with a magical encore – Remember Me, My Dear. This was most fitting in The Hilliard Ensemble’s 40th and final season. It is an evening I will remember for a long time.
Clarissima 