NOTES

ROBERT HOLLINGWORTH

The Full Monteverdi was a dramatised account of (fairly unarguably) the greatest book of music for unaccompanied voices ever written, Monteverdi’s fourth book of madrigals from 1603. These powerful pieces (having little in common with most of their more gentle English cousins) demand passion, discipline and virtuosity from the singers and their expressive power is unmatched, as we have found when singing them in concert to a wide range of different audiences.

The Full Monteverdi began as a project in the mind of opera director John La Bouchardière (see below). He had an innovative idea of presenting the whole book, requiring it to be learnt by heart. He approached Harry Christophers of The Sixteen who pushed him our way. I was initially sceptical because of the technical and acoustical demands of the production but changed my mind after experimenting with it in a rehearsal space. It turned into the most demanding project we have ever undertaken.

Central to it was how to make the subject matter mean something to a contemporary listener. With an opera, you can sympathise with the characters. In a Schubert song-cycle you travel with the singer through very personal poetry. So with Monteverdi’s fourth book? As always with madrigals, the difficulty was how to bring the poetry alive and how to make believable a set of emotions expressed by five individuals simultaneously.

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JOHN LA BOUCHARDIÈRE

The Full Monteverdi was a bit of an accident or a series of happy ones. From working in large opera houses, I had come to miss the close physical relationship between performers and the audience. I wanted the public to feel the same visceral performance of singers that I knew from rehearsals. So I started looking for material that could be experienced without the barrier of an orchestra pit but, instead of thinking of where else one might place an orchestra, wanted to explore doing without it entirely.

No orchestra (or no accompaniment) meant a cappella, which was a comfortable world for me, after my chorister days, but was an exceedingly unlikely source of dramatic material. I had known Monteverdi’s Book IV for many years and so turned to this early in my search. Having always experienced the book as a single entity on record I sensed a dramatic arch to the collection, though it is doubtful that one was ever intended. The poems all concern the fate of abandoned lovers, so there was a definite subject too. The conceptual challenge, however, came in trying negotiate what seemed an implausible dead-end: when, in real life, do several different people utter something so intimate as “I love you, don’t leave me” as a group?

Some months later, I was sitting in a restaurant and noticed that several of those people at the tables around me were having variously unhappy evenings: to one side was a couple whose conversation had dried up the moment the waitress had taken away the menu; to another was a couple trying to suppress a heated conversation; and there was also a woman who appeared to have been stood up. It occurred to me that these people were at different points of a similar journey in this space and that, if they were synchronised, might utter the same words at the same time. Thus the restaurant became a space in which the multi-voiced madrigal could exist as polyphonic drama.

Only later, during discussions with Robert and then in workshop and rehearsal, did the most exceptional qualities of the project become apparent: the intimate proximity of the performers created an acutely voyeuristic experience for an audience which found itself trapped inside an agonisingly emotional, shifting surround-sound version of Monteverdi’s counterpoint. In modern restaurants, such music would only ever sit in the background: the tables had been turned.