What am I listening to?
The track you are hearing is from the Orlando Consort’s most recent CD, Mantra. The project begins from an historical event: the arrival of the Portuguese missionaries in Goa. We know that they brought their own music with them and even their own instruments (the most popular instrument in India remains the harmonium and its import is down to these Christian visitors). Interestingly, rather than imposing their music on the native culture, they invited the locals to bring their instruments along and join in. Absolve, the track to which you are listening, is our take on this, a piece by Pedro de Escobar c.1465- 1535) with an improvised vocal line by Shahid Khan. The album can be purchased here.
News
East Neuk Festival: Highlight of 2011
This from The Scotsman. The various critics were asked for their personal highlights of this year and this is how Claire Black responded:
Candles flickered beneath leaded windows and the chill night air inside St Monans Parish Church stilled. The Orlando Consort began to sing Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame, a 14th century polyphonic mass, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. This is what the East Neuk Festival does quite brilliantly – filling tiny, historic venues with world-class musicians for the benefit of a devoted – and growing – audience. It was my first year, but it won’t be my last. Next year’s starts on 27 June.
And so say all of us. Svend Brown, the artistic director, always comes up with brilliant programming ideas and places them in extraordinary settings. We wish him and Festival well for next year and thank him for inviting us to participate.
Florence and Singapore
We've visited a couple of extraordinary places in the past few weeks. First of all: Florence. As any casual lover of the Renaissance will know, this is a place full of wonderful churches stuffed to the gunnels with art. And music, of course, was an equally important part of that world; the sounds may have been lost, but they can be recreated. As part of Martin Randall Tours, we were invited to perform three concerts. The first was in the beautifaul Chiesa da Santa Trinita where we sang music of Dufay and other composers associated with the city. The following day we performed two concerts in the Tuscan countryside, specifically at the Villa La Ferdinanda in Artimino, some forty minutes from the centre of Florence. As ever, we were happy to meet our audience and mingle with them at lunch and, Florence being a small city, we also tended to bump into them on other occasions.
 In November we jetted off to Singapore where we were performing two concerts of Mantra. Kuljit and Shahid were waiting for us - they had been visiting India - whilst the singers and Jonathan flew directly. Singapore is a real melting pot of cultures - Indian, British, Malaysian, Chinese - the perfect place then for a crossover project. The concerts were at the invitation of the National Museum of Singapore (see left) and took place in the Gallery Theatre on consecutive nights. The Orlando Consort also conducted a workshop for the music  department of the University of Singapore. (see left).
Pictured below is the group and our hosts in the famous Raffles hotel. Many thanks to Lee Chor Lin for inviting us, to her staff for looking after us so well, and to Goh Ching Lee for taking care of all the details.
Left to Right: Angus; Goh Ching Lee - the Orlando Consort's new South East Asia agent and founder of CultureLink; Ms Lee Chor Lin - Director of the National Museum of Singapore; Shahid; Kuljit; Jonathan; Matt, Don; Mark.
Wroclaw
Recently the Orlando Consort has been in
Wroclaw where we performed two concerts. The first was wiith a collection of local school choirs, some sixty in all, who were coached and conducted by Matt in the art of plainsong. The children's choir then accompanied the Consort in a performance of mainly thirteenth-century organum, with the adults performing the poilyphony.
The pictures above show Matt conducting the massed choirs, and the finale to the concert when the five teachers who instructed the children prior to Matt's arrival came up to the stage to receive their bows.
 The second concert took place in a local restaurant which can trace its existence back to the fourteenth century. The programme was of medieval music with common themes of food and drink, the first half performed in a small hall, the second in the restaurant itself where the Consort performed shorter sets which interspersed the courses served to those lucky enough to have bough tickets. Mark doesn't always end up on the floor. Usually he's very good at holding his drink....
Matt and Venner
 This spotted in a newsagents in Norway recently. We are assured that Mat and Venner means "Food and Friends" which is a comforting thought. If it had meant "Young and Forgetful" we wouldn't have been surpriised.
Summer 2011
 It’s been a busy summer for the Orlando Consort and an enjoyable one. In June we joined forces with Kuljit, Jon and Shahid for a collaboration with the Waltham Singers under their dynamic conductor Andrew Fardell. The first half featured Victoria’s Missa O Quam Gloriosum sung by the choir interspersed with motets sung by the four of us. The second half featured music from Mantra with the choir singing the choral parts with gusto and obvious pleasure. Andrew, incidentally, was at Kent University shortly after Don left his alma mater and, though they didn’t know each other at the time, has been a great supporter of the group. It was as Head of Music at New Hall School that Extempore II had its very first airing only a few days before we went into the studio to record it. We thank him and the Waltham Singers for their gracious hospitality.
In July we returned to East Neuk to sing two concerts. The first, featuring Stephen Burrows as the extra countertenor, was of the Ockeghem Requiem and related motets, an extraordinary work and one we much enjoy performing. The following day, Matt and Stephen flew home and Rob Macdonald joined Angus, Mark and Don to perform motets by De Vitry and the Machaut mass in the wonderful small church in St Monans, the venue at which we featured two world premieres by Tarik O’Regan and Giles Swayne three years ago.  Whilst there, we paid our now-traditional visit to the Himalayas, the eighteen-hole putting green at St Andrews (Angus won, as he always does) and to a fantastic off licence with a fine selection of microbrewery ales from which Rob and Don had to be dragged away
Later in July we sang music by Dunstable and contemporaries in the famous York Early Music Festival, the concert broadcast by the BBC. It’s always great to be back in York; it feels very much the spiritual home of early music, not least through the efforts of Delma Tomlin, Director of York Early Music Festival and the National Centre for Early Music, who was awarded an MBE in 2008. 
Then it was on to the Gower Festival and a performance of The Rose, the Lily and the Whortleberry in the church of St Mary, Rhossili on a spectacular summer’s day.
Shortly after that we were on the road to Schwäbisch-Gmund, a small Bavarian town which hosts an annual music festival. This was the second visit for the Orlando Consort and the first outing of Mantra in Germany. A late-night concert audience, initially unsure how to react in a church, led by Shahid’s robotic dancing, were by the end stamping and clapping.
August will see us all on well-deserved holidays and on the first of September we will be heading to Poland and the Wroclaw festival.
Mark Dobell: Star of stage and screen
Keen-eyed viewers of last week's Royal Wedding might have noticed a face familiar to those who have attended Orlando Consort concerts or studied this web site. Yes, your eyes weren't deceiving you: that was Mark singing in the Westminster Abbey Choir. It might surprise some of you. Was he moonlighting? The truth is that no man can live by medieval music alone; we're professional singers and appear in a variety of situations. Many of the faces you see in the early-music scene have benefited from training as choristers and are currently supported by paid Church work. Both Matt and Don were choristers at Westminster Abbey (Don having sung at the wedding of Princess Anne back in 1973) and Matt is now a vicar choral at St Paul's. Rumours that Matt is not talking to Mark because the Abbey 'got' the Royal Wedding and St Paul's didn't are exaggerated.
If you missed Mark's appearance, you might want to check out this video on YouTube. Mark was clearly popular with the director, making notable appearances at 0.54, 1.46 and 3.17. Also present was Robert Macdonald, the bass who has appeared on several Orlando Consort recordings and in concert with us.
February 2011 Tour Diary
"We often feel, when stranded out by a freeway in a hotel, that we have very little access to cultural activities. I would argue, however, that dining at a Waffle House is in itself a fascinating cultural experience....and if you want to experience cultural difference, try explaining to the regulars that you are over here to sing medieval music…"
Read Mark Dobell's wry, witty and entertaining report of our recent trip to the USA here
Back home..
 ..as the England '66 World Cup Squad put it. Safely back in England after a visit to the USA for three concerts in Columbus, OH, Stockton, CA and New York, NY. Mark has been writing a diary so check back soon to discover about the the fire in Columbus, Sunday morning in Stockton, and our debut at Carnegie Hall.
All went very well, particularly the concert in New York which was a buzz for us all. Allan Kozinn, esteemed critic for the New York Times, had flagged the concert ahead of time ("a fine British quartet") and also wrote a review which referenced "the tightly blended sound that has long been its trademark". The full review can be found here.
Pictured right, Jennifer Flores - who took such good care of us at Carnegie Hall - holding the poster for the concert.
The picture below shows Argo curled up reading the New York Times review. From the baseball and the violin we can surmise that he's had a busy morning. Argo, incidentally, belongs to Robert Besen, our redoubtable US agent.
Medieval Song Network
Keen readers of this website may have noted that the Orlando Consort will be giving a concert as part of the Medieval Song Network, a research group based at the Institute for Musical Research. We're proud of our involvment with this project and invite you to visit their website which can be found here.
Radcliffe Trust residencies
It's been a busy start to the year. We've been working hard giving lectures and workshops in three  universities - Bangor, Durham and Nottingham - as part of a residency scheme funded in part by a generous donation from the Radcliffe Trust. This has seen us advising on productions of The Marriage of Figaro and The Coronation of Poppea as well as music closer to our chosen period, that of the medieval era. As well as working with specialist ensembles and choirs, we have also worked with composition students informing them of the expectations that performers might have and the sometimes very real difficulties of realising their dreams in vocal form. As part of the residency we have also given concerts at each location and, well, experienced some of the local ale, only for reasons of research you understand. Our visit to Durham saw us working with the Egglescliffe Senior Girls Chamber Choir led by their inspirational teacher Matthew Haworth. We worked with them last year when we presented Mantra at the Sage in Gateshead. It was, as the Mantra collaboration proved to be, an inspirational afternoon and we encouraged them to trust in their (excellent) ensemble skills and ditch the conductor. They took to the idea with alacrity and had no difficulty at all in performing without Matthew's guidance, something which will stand them in good stead and help them to listen to each other in performance situations.
2011
Well, what does 2011 bring for The Orlando Consort? January sees us busy in academic mode with three residencies at Bangor, Durham and Nottingham. In Bangor we will present workshops and seminars on medieval compositional techniques, the relationship between text and music, as well as more performance-based workshops with various university choirs and consorts. In Durham, as well as working with a local school choir, we will address and assess compositions by young composers offering insights into the difficulties they pose for performers and making suggestions prompted by their work. In Nottingham we will work with ensembles and also provide musical examples in teaching contexts. At all three universities we will give concerts. This work, an important part of our profile as an ensemble, has been made possible by the generous funding of the Radcliffe Trust whose mandate is to promote and encourage music.
February sees us heading across the pond for one of our short but intense tours. We will visit Columbus, OH were , in addition to giving a concert of music inspired by the theme of love, we will also present a small concert for local schoolchildren. Then it's across to the West Coast for a concert at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA, before returning to New York to give our first ever concert at the prestigious Carnegie Hall (see concerts page for full details).
Later in the year sees us giving more performances of the successful Mantra project in London and Germany, a collaboration with the Waltham Singers which will draw on the approach advanced with Mantra, as well as more mainstream concerts in Sheffield, London, and return visits to East Neuk, York, and the Gower peninsula.
There is also one further project which has now begun in earnest, namely our role as associate performing ensemble to the Leverhulme Trust-funded project, The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, led by Yolanda Plumley at the University of Exeter. The Orlando Consort will work alongside a team of scholars - Yolanda Plumley, Anne Stone, Jacques Boogaart, Barton Palmer and Uri Smilansky - to create the first modern-day edition of the complete poetry and music of Guillaume de Machaut. The resulting volumes will be published in print and online by Medieval Institute Publications and TEAMS/METS. A Digital Research Environment, a truly multimedia website, will host recordings made by The Orlando Consort, together with performers from Le Basile, of key musical examples and options to enhance the edition.
Matt and Julia's wedding
It's not often that we feature really personal news on this website, but we thought that Matt and Julia's wedding was worthy of comment. On Saturday 17th July Matthew Venner and Julia Hodges were married in Dulwich College Chapel. The choir, in which Angus and Don sang, was brilliantly conducted by Matt's dad, Jonathan Venner. The reception was held at Dulwich College where Matt teaches voice, and Matt's speech was delivered with applomb. Not once did he fumble with the microphone or drop it (a sometime feature of his announcements in Orlando Consort concerts) and no-one croaked out the immortal line heard in New York: "Your voice isn't loud enough!"
Suffice to say that Angus, Don and Mark would like to congratulate them both and wish the married couple every happiness.
|
