Da Camera performances
Ensemble Organum adds a modern touch to medieval music
Marcel Pérès and the Ensemble Organum
The motherhouse for the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, Villa de Mateland its adjoining chapel are beautiful examples of the Romanesque architecturalstyle.Photo by David Schmoll
The Rothko Chapel is “spiritual but completely abstract” as is the Machaut’scomposition.
The words “ancient” and “Houston” are seldom found in the same sentence. But Da Camera makes this pairing possible by bringing French musicologist Marcel Pérès and the Ensemble Organum to town for two performances of the 14th Century Messe de Notre Dame, the first mass to be attributed to a single composer-- Guillaume de Machaut--and one of the greatest religious compositions of all time.
The performances are Thursday in the Villa de Matel chapel, and Friday in the Rothko Chapel.
It’s easy to see why Da Camera programmed Pérès and the Ensemble for the Villa. The motherhouse for the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, Villa de Matel and its adjoining chapel are beautiful examples of the Romanesque architectural style, which predated the Gothic. The Villa is the only place in town where a visitor feels somehow transported back--a little, at least--to the European Middle Ages. This is especially true in the Neo-Byzantine chapel with its vaulted, tiled ceilings and marble columns from France and Italy. The German and Irish stained glass windows are superb.
The Ensemble Organum vocal group makes sense for the Villa because they specialize in medieval and early music, especially in chant. They also look for, and find, enduring traces of the medieval in more modern music, even music of the 20th century. Machaut and his Messe is the perfect subject for Pérès and his group. That’s because Machaut’s music is both deeply medieval, and strangely modern, according to Da Camera artistic director Sarah Rothenberg.
“Machaut sounds avant-garde,” she says, “in the way he uses pitch, and bends pitch. The Ensemble Organum brings out the modernity in this medieval, religious music.”
In The New York Times Essential Library: Classical Music: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings, critic Allan Kozinn writes about the Ensemble Organum’s recording of the Messe, “instead of smooth, highly pitched timbres…the Ensemble Organum gives a reading that is earthy and slightly rough at the edges…and the upper vocal lines are adorned with an improvisatory form of vocal ornamentation—everything from wiggled notes and sliding attacks to more ambitious expansions,” and concludes by saying, “Recordings of antique church music don’t get much more involved than this.”
Rothenberg is excited about both locales, the ancient-seeming Villa and the eternally modern Rothko.
The music is appropriate for the Villa, she says, because the convent and its chapel evoke “the church’s historic role in the development of music.” The Rothko, on the other hand, is “spiritual but completely abstract,” as is the Machaut’s composition. Best of all, perhaps, they are both “resonant spaces.” This is a “voices only” concert, so cathedral-style resonance is of the essence.
The French Consulate asked Da Camera to present Pérès and the Ensemble Organum in conjunction with the The Mourners: Tomb Sculpture from the Court of Burgundy, on view at the Dallas Museum of Art through January 2, 2011.
