I enjoyed this CD which I reviewed for MusicWeb International. Here's my review - and you can order it from them.
Considering she lived
almost a thousand years ago and stands as one of the first composers in musical
history whose name can be unquestionably attributed to specific and original
musical works – she composed 77 settings of her own mystic visions - we know a
surprising amount about Hildegard von Bingen.
We know about her family, her early days in a convent, the window out of
which she looked on the world (and through which the world looked at her), her
dealings with the religious and temporal leaders of her age, her remarkably
persuasive and, as we would call it today, entrepreneurial abilities, the
places she visited, the people she knew, the ideas, thoughts and opinions she
had and, of course, the mystic visions which led her not only to set them to
music but to commit the music to manuscript and thus to posterity. What we do not know is how that music was
performed in her own time, what it sounded like then and how contemporary
listeners and performers responded to it.
It is a common failing
among those who attempt “authentic” performances of music to authenticate them
only in terms of physical instrumental attributes and notions of pitch and
tempo. In other respects, such
performances all too often assume 21st century concepts and ethics
as being constants throughout the ages, and wrap up historical evidence in
sounds designed to meet the expectations of 21st century ears rather
than those of earlier times. In the case
of Hildegard, we only have those 21st century ears to go on, so this
is not a recording which in any way attempts to address the issue; there is no
pretence that these are in any way aiming at an “authentic” performance style.
Ask any member of the
general public to describe classical music and very soon the word “beautiful”
will crop up. Otherwise intelligent and
logically-minded people will often go weak at the knees in the face of old
classical music and coo lovingly about its beauty and its calming effects. It is rather sad that great music is so often
reduced to superficial notions of beauty – like the assessment of a woman as
beautiful rather than as a living, breathing, thinking, and complex human
being. That feminine analogy is
singularly apt when dealing with Hildegard, for it is often difficult to assess
her as a composer without having to wade through acres of feminist ideologies. Barbora Kabátková’s booklet notes with this
CD are no exception, and highlight the concept of women relegated to an
inferior status to men since the days of Eve.
Without wishing to get into feminist arguments, I would only say that
such arguments only serve to diminish the extraordinary achievement of Hildegard,
not in being a woman in a man’s world, but in being a composer in a world where
composers did not exist at all as individuals.
The Tiburtina Ensemble
comprises nine women’s voices which blend beautifully in this sequence of
carefully selected extracts from Hildegard’s Visions. While they trace with immaculate precision
the musical fabric of Hildegard’s creations, a trio of “old-testament instruments”
– two harps and a zither (or dulce melos)
– provides an improvised accompaniment, as well as a couple of purely
instrumental interludes. With the aid
of a misty acoustical environment, a perfectly manicured vocal tone, delicate
and ethereal improvised instrumental support – often tinkling away in the
background like so many wind chimes in an ornamental garden – and a general
atmosphere of ersatz-medievality, we have Hildegard presented on disc here in
much the manner we might expect from a movie director keen to take us back to a
long-forgotten age, where chivalrous knights serenaded unattainable maidens in
high castle windows (preferably with flowing golden tresses). It has that slightly false feeling of
creating its own legend, rather than cutting through legend to the hard facts
underneath. We even have the long-drawn
out final fade as an anonymous setting of Psalm 8 evokes a procession of
medieval nuns moving out of the chapel and into the twilight zone beyond.
However, there is no
denying that this is a highly effective and, yes, beautiful recording, which,
in default of a genuinely authentic approach, gives our 21st century
ears just what they like. In her booklet
notes, Kabátková, who also directs the ensemble and is one of the two harpists
(the other is also a singer in the group, Hana Blažíková, while the zither
player is Margit Ubellacker) writes how the recordings were made over several
days in the Cistercian Monastery at Osek where the musicians were able to
ponder “the events of recent days – the sweeping celebrations of the 70th
anniversary of the end of World War II, or the cruel bloodshed in Ukraine and
Syria” while recalling that the monastery had been transformed during the 1950s
by the Communist regime into a “prison facility for nuns from several congregations
throughout the whole of Czechoslovakia”.
Little wonder that this recording positively oozes atmosphere,
reflection and an aura of deep devotion and spiritual commitment.
Do not look to this
recording to give historical substances to one of music’s first great
composers. Instead relish the way this
ancient music speaks to our own age when treated with such love and devotion by
these committed and sincere performers.
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