Classical and Jazz: Review - The King’s Consort at Wigmore Hall
Published: 14 March 2011
by NICK KOCHAN
SEVENTEENTH-century ecclesiastical music has a degree of formality that requires enormous control from its performers and great concentration from its audience. The King’s Consort, under its remarkable director and conductor Robert King, are masters of the form.
This sense of control was evoked powerfully in Couperin’s Magnificat anima mea. Soprano Carolyn Sampson, and mezzo soprano Marianne Beate Kielland, brought an empathetic power to a complex work at the Wigmore Hall concert.
Slighter works by Marais (Chaconne in A and Tombeau pour Sieur de Ste Colombe) were the prelude to the evening’s pièce de résistance, the Trois Leçons de Ténèbres by Couperin. This grand and densely textured work has 14 sections, part sung by the soprano and part by the mezzo- soprano, where each section is identified by a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It recounts (in Latin) Jeremiah’s lamentation at the fall of Jerusalem and the loss of Zion. The piece is sung during the melancholic period of Easter, and each of the three lessons ends with the line: Jerusalem, convertare ad Dominum Deum tuum (O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn to the Lord your God).
Music of this sincerity and austerity was written in an age of reason and restraint. The King’s Consort have the technical grasp to delight an audience (with hardly a Wigmore chair empty), many already devoted to so-called “Early Music”.