Cork Choral Festival: Giving voice to The Waste Land, by TS Eliot
British vocal ensemble I Fagiolini will perform at Cork International Choral Festival. Picture: Matthew Brodie
I Fagiolini, the British vocal ensemble founded 35 years ago by Robert Hollingworth, have established a reputation for innovative programmes and a theatrical approach. They come to the Cork International Choral Festival for the first time to perform their latest project titled ‘Re-Wilding The Waste Land’, which offers meditations in words and music on themes of renewal and regeneration using TS Eliot’s classic poem as a key element.
The Waste Land is regarded as one of the most important of the 20th century has relevance for today’s audiences as Hollingworth, director and countertenor, explained to me by phone from his base in York University.
“It is the similarity in where he [TS Eliot] was to where we are at now," says Hollingworth. "It's the 100 years anniversary of the piece, he wrote it in the aftermath of the First World War and the Spanish flu. There's a war in Europe, which we're on the edge of wondering whether we should enter and trying not to. The Archduke is mentioned in The Waste Land, whose death began the First World War. We worry about what the future is – you bring climate change into that.”
All of which, Hollingworth admits might be a turn-off for audiences looking for some escapism in their cultural experience. “I didn't like it to start with because I thought I had to understand everything but if you dump all that, and simply listen to it as a fascinating stream of consciousness, just let it bounce off you. The poem takes you from the grey trenches to a tropical rain forest and the music reinforces the message.”
The programme which received glowing reviews when the programme premiered in the UK last year with actor Tamsin Greig narrating, features readings of the five sections of Eliot’s epic poem and contemporary literary responses spliced with Renaissance music, choral works from Eliot's time and no less than six new works commissioned by the ensemble.
In Cork, Bernadette Cronin takes on the role of narrator. “What the program does is to take you on a journey that starts bleakly with the poem itself, 'April is the cruellest month'," says Hollingworth. "It is amazing to be performing this program in April one hundred years after it was published. It opens with Renaissance composer William Byrd’s setting written after the martyrdom of a Jesuit priest in 1581 that describes bodies of the saints being laid out for the birds to eat.
"If you think of what's going on in Ukraine now, it's a direct description of that. You’ve got the Victoria’s Tenebrae, Responses for Holy Week, set in a low part of the register, deep and dark. But the music sort of takes us elsewhere by the end. The final piece is the most beautiful setting by Joanna Marsh of a poem by an Irish poet John F Deane called ‘The World is Charged', itself a response to a poem, 'God’s Grandeur', by Gerald Manley Hopkins.”
What makes 16th century and contemporary composers such compatible companions? “Because the greatest composers of those centuries, wrote the best music for acapella ensembles. If you think of 17th & 18th century music, there was accompanying continuo and orchestra with nearly everything. It wasn't until the 20th century and the rebirth in the interest of 16th century music that people started to take that music seriously again.”
The ensemble, he emphasises, is not a choir but a one-voice-to-a-part vocal ensemble, the musical equivalent, Hollingworth suggests, of five people painting a scene on a canvas at the same time.
While the discussion is about music that tackles deep themes, there is a light-hearted tone to the conversation with the animated director who admits to a childhood ambition to be custard pie-d on national tv by Spike Milligan and cites twin enthusiasms for Monty Python and Monteverdi in his biography. The name ‘I Fagiolini’ translates as green beans, a curious name for a high brow acapella group which he explains is a 35-year-old joke.
“When I was at university, there was that interest in historically informed performance and all the period instrument orchestras that came up to Oxford to accompany choirs seemed to be yoghurt-knitting vegetarians. That music became referred to as beanie-music.”
Increasingly, Hollingworth has been filming his projects and the ensemble’s website is stuffed with all sorts of videos that reveal a multifaceted performing approach. Keen singers should check out SingTheScore, comprising three dozen or so YouTube videos analysing a short early music piece. Part tutorial, part absurdist comedy sketch, they show Hollingworth’s impulse is to both inform and entertain.
- I Fagiolini, Thursday, April 28, 8pm, Cathedral of St Mary & St Anne (The North Chapel)
Wednesday April 27th Opening Gala Concert Handel’s Messiah Concert celebrating G.F. Handel’s, the 'Messiah', performed by Sestina choir from Northern Ireland.: 8pm in Cork City Hall.
Thursday April 28th Gala Performance of ‘Re- Wilding the Wasteland’ by Il Fagiolini A new programme inspired by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, ‘Re-Wilding the Wasteland’: 8pm at the Cathedral of St Mary and St Ann (Cork)
Friday April 29th 7.30pm at St Finbarres Cathedral Chamber Choir Ireland Programme includes the premier performance of the winning composition of the 2022 Seán Ó Riada composition competition ‘Behind This Light’ by Daragh Black Hynes.
CCI continue their retrospective on Steve Martland, Friday, 10pm at Triskel Arts Centre Latvian Voices presents ‘Sounds of Latvian Nature’ Latvian Voices. a professional a cappella group from Latvia. Using their voices as the only musical instrument, they have developed an individual vocal style, in which the sounds from the ethnic music of many nations intertwine.
Saturday April 30th 8pm at Cork City Hall, The Fleischmann International Gala Concert Top amateur choirs competing for the Fleischmann International Trophy, one of the most prestigious choral prizes in Europe.
The annual Big Sing, which returns on Saturday April 30th at 4.15pm to Cork City Hall,
Sunday May 1st 8pm at Cork City Hall, Closing Gala Concert International choirs will present choral music representative of their musical and ethnic backgrounds in a final concert.
