On his first day as a student at the Royal Academy of Music, brave young tenor Ed Lyon asked his tutor if they could venture immediately into the extremely challenging world of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals. It never happened – until this week, when that very tutor, Laurence Cummings, directed that now internationally famous former student, alongside a top ensemble of singers and instrumentalists from the Academy of Ancient Music. Years later, Lyon’s youthful ambition was finally realised – and in superb style.
No wonder he was keen. Published in Venice in 1638, just four years before his death, Monteverdi’s Eighth Book, Madrigali Guerrieri et Amorosi, is an extraordinary document, a display of compositional authority that takes the madrigal to new heights of expression and audacious harmony, all drawn from across the composer’s long career and brought together in one place as a final testament to his genius.
The division of the pieces into madrigals of love and war is really no more than a gesture; the warlike numbers are as much concerned with the battles of love as they are with any real fisticuffs. Monteverdi ensures that both the war and the love sections contain an extended, theatrical madrigal, and here we can see what Lyon was aiming for all those years ago.
Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda concerns those two characters from Tasso’s epic poem, but Monteverdi gives them very little to sing. He reserves all the drama for the tenor narrator, a virtuoso role in which Lyon excelled. His wonderfully agile, expressive singing was alert to every nuance in the text, and his remorse, when Tancredi discovers he has unknowingly killed his lover Clorinda, was utterly believable. This was a remarkable performance of music that makes serious demands on a singer’s technique.
When the book turns to love, its dramatic centrepiece is Lamento della Ninfa, the poetic tale of a young woman’s despair at discovering her lover has fallen for another woman. Soprano Anna Dennis, an equal to Lyon when it comes to beauty of line and technique, was the picture of dejection as she sang this yearning lament so movingly, with a gentle passacaglia from two theorbos and viola da gamba whispering along underneath.
The evening had opened with acrobatic music for the whole ensemble. After a graceful sinfonia, the singers arriving one by one, at their vocal entrances in Altri canti d’Amor, interspersing themselves among the instrumentalists. (Lyon, for instance, sprang up from the seat just in front of me in the auditorium.) Bass Rob Macdonald had particularly rapid semiquavers to navigate just as he stepped on stage – not an easy task, but carried off with aplomb.
The deliciously hushed beginning of Hor che’l ciel e la terra, in which Monteverdi uses subtle repeated chords to conjure the world asleep, was a particularly gripping moment, Cummings drawing pure magic from the whole ensemble. And there was more delight later when Dennis and Macdonald were joined by Danni O’Neill, Ciara Hendrick and Rory Carver in Dolcissimo uscignolo (Sweetest nightingale), a jewel of a piece, rendered with tender devotion by these fine singers.
Anyone lucky enough to have seen Garsington Opera’s production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, will recall Cummings directing from the keyboard and Lyon’s towering performance in the eponymous role. They might also recall Cummings rising from the harpsichord to sing. It happened again last night. In Vago augelleto che cantando vai (Pretty little bird, you keep on singing) Cummings picked up his score from his harpsichord and joined the singers, his light tenor supplying the necessary seventh voice. A lovely gesture of musical camaraderie.
The Eighth Book isn’t all lovesick lament and warlike posturing. Monteverdi leavens the diet with rumbustious dance movements which swing along with infectious rhythms, which last night were accentuated by Cummings banging out the beat on the timber underneath the keyboard of his harpsichord. So cool, and one of the many unexpected delights in an evening of supremely accomplished music-making.
