Alphonse de Lamartine said music is the language of the heart; L. P. Hartley said the past is a foreign country. Music from the past, then, is something like the language of a foreign heart. It requires a deft translator to render this language for modern ears, and for the last thirty-five years Britain’s Orlando Consort has served such a role.
Since 1988, the vocal ensemble of four (sometimes five) men has recorded and performed renditions of early music throughout Europe and North America. Now, they have decided to give their voices a rest: it was recently announced that the group’s current tour would be its last. They sang their final New York concert together last Saturday, November 19, presented by Miller Theatre at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin.
The program, entitled “1521: Josquin’s World,” celebrated the music of Josquin Desprez (1450–1521), whom the group calls the “greatest and most influential composer the Western world had yet seen,” at least by the sixteenth century. The Franco-Flemish composer’s life overlapped with the first printing of standardized sheet music, the discovery of the New World, and the germ of the Reformation.
Accordingly, the program sought to capture the character of these radical developments. Desprez’s work was featured alongside the efforts of other notable contemporaries influenced by him—thus Marian motets, for example, were interspersed among secular songs of great force, and even a modest hymn by Martin Luther was sung. The result was a varied and colorful musical tapestry of this multifarious epoch.
Anchored by Robert Macdonald’s bass and propelled upward by Matthew Venner’s lofty countertenor, the Consort had no issue filling the church’s massive nave with sound. From behind their unadorned music stands and without pomp, the small chorus cast barreling waves of voice into every corner of the space with quintet pieces such as De profundis clamavi (Desprez) and maintained the same vigor in more restrained pieces, including Brumel’s (1460–1513) Mater patris et filia, arranged for a trio.
Indeed, it was in some of the simpler, more essentialized compositions that the ensemble’s particular skill revealed itself: take, for example, their interpretation of the Kyrie from Jean Mouton’s (1459–1522) Missa Tua est potential. Mouton’s liturgical hymn contains only the three distinct words of the Greek prayer: “Kyrie eleison./ Criste, eleison./ Kyrie eleison.” These words are then repeated and layered atop one another with increasing complexity and variance, their embellishment growing with every measure. In the charge of the Consort, these repetitions were transfigured into something continually surprising yet embodied—with just their voices, they elevated even the plainest language into something mysterious.
Of course, many of the works in the ensemble’s repertoire are a half-millennia older than these half-millennia-old works prepared for the other night. Such is the company’s versatility—their range of talent accommodates music dating from 1050 up through the Renaissance, a five-hundred-year span during which music evolved in ways near impossible for modern listeners to comprehend. Try to imagine a hypothetical musician just as skilled in reproducing Vivaldi as he is Sondheim, and you’ll get an idea of the scope of the Orlando Consort. Just as the Consort filled the expanses of the church, its members have occupied a significant space in the interpretation of early music for close to half a century. Their absence will be felt in and outside these sacred halls.