Over the years, the Hilliard Ensemble has developed a flexible approach to the construction of concert programmes. In our many performances with the great saxophonist Jan Garbarek, we usually had a good idea of the music we would sing, but it was not until the sound check in the afternoon that we fine-tuned the set list, adjusting things to suit the acoustic of the building, or to our mood. But for our concert on 20 December at Wigmore Hall, we thought it wise to firm things up further in advance.
As it’s December, it will be no surprise that the audience will hear some Christmas music. But this is not just an event to mark the end of 2014. After 40 years of singing music written as long ago as the 11th century, and as recently as the 21st, tonight’s will also be the last ever Hilliard concert.
The programme we have devised for this final performance is a bit unstructured – that’s unusual for us. But taken together it represents much that has been important to us, and to the people who have been close to us and who will be in the audience. We were also keen to include a few pieces written for us by composers who will also be in attendance.
Sadly, Pérotin is one composer who won’t be there, but we’ve sung his music for a long time and so will open the concert with his “Viderunt Omnes”, an extraordinary 11-minute work from 1198 that was possibly the first piece ever written for four separate voices. It’s a gradual (to be sung from the steps, the gradus, of the altar) for one of the masses of Christmas and was first heard at Notre Dame in Paris.
In those days, composers were experimenting with ornamentation on top of plainsong melodies, but never before had there been anything as big and grand as this. Having seen part of the manuscript, have no idea how the original singers coped and am full of admiration for them. The cathedral would have been a bit smaller than it is now, but it must have been remarkable to go into mass that day and either sing, or listen to, music the like of which had not been heard before.
While the older music we sing has made its way down the centuries more or less intact, we often know very little about the people who wrote it. All we have about the Tudor composer of “Ah, gentle Jesu”, a deceptively simple dialogue between a penitent sinner (sung by two high voices) and Jesus on the cross, (sung by the two lower voices) is his surname, Sheryngham. We don’t even have that for the creator of wonderful works such as the lullaby carol “Lullay, lullow”, written around 1500 and part of a series of carols, masses and motets whose dialect suggests that they come from the West Country.
We also have no name for the East Anglian scribe who, in 1420, wrote the carol “There is no rose”, about the Virgin Mary – “Ther is no rose of swych virtu / As is the rose that bar Jhesu. / Alleluia.” A lot of people will recognise the work, however, as it has survived in the church repertoire for Christmas.
The very last word of “There is no rose” is “Transeamus”, meaning “we travel on”, and when we were planning our final CD it seemed an appropriately upbeat title. Having just recorded music written for us by Roger Marsh we thought it would be a good idea to go back to the group’s roots in early English music. So we sight-read our way through the Musica Britannica volume of English carols to identify things that would fit our mix of a baritone, two tenors and a countertenor voice. Transeamus contains English Christmas music, motets and carols, although the carols are not exclusively for Christmas. It includes an anonymously written one about Thomas Becket, in which the poet tries to hedge his bets between the church and the throne by saying how great Becket was while at the same time trying to keep the king happy. A difficult line to tread. There are also pieces about the Virgin Mary and St Anne which sort of refer to each other and to the Nativity.
We always felt our final concert should combine great works from the distant past with pieces written more recently. When the composer Piers Hellawell attended one of our summer schools for vocal groups in 1995 he brought with him a copy of the Elizabethan miniaturist and portraitist Nicholas Hilliard’s book, A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning (limning means painting in miniature). The group were named after Hilliard, to reflect a similar sense of precision and our attention to detail in music from the same era. Piers extracted and set to music various sections, some about how to draw, some about how to mix colour, and his settings of “True beautie” and “Saphire” seemed obvious choices for our last concert.
Likewise, Marsh has worked with us at one of our summer schools. Last year, when we gathered together nearly all the singers who had been in the group over the years, we asked him to write a piece and he came up with “Poor Yorick”, not referencing Shakespeare, but Laurence Sterne who used the name in Tristram Shandy and for himself as the writer of sermons. Roger’s work is in three sections, one for the four former Hilliards, one for the current group, and one for us all together. We’ll sing the middle section, “The Death of Yorick” this evening.
As we approach the final performance I’ve really no idea how we will feel on the night. We’ve sung more than 100 concerts around the world this year, and throughout, we’ve resisted as strongly as we could calling it a “farewell tour”. That would have seemed so maudlin and mawkish.and it has been poignant to tick off our “lasts”. The last concert in Prague, the last in Vienna and in Germany, which has been like a second home to us. The last concert with Garbarek, with whom we’ve worked for 20 years, came earlier this month at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge with us all moving around the marvellous acoustic space with, his sax providing a fifth voice. We’ve also sung for the last time the big pieces written for us by Arvo Pärt, although we will sing his “Most Holy Mother of God” tonight. I just hope we can get through everything – some of the pieces are quite tricky – especially if it turns out to be a bit of a Kleenex evening.
As for the very last piece we will perform, we’ve decided on “An Excursion into the Mountains”, which is a section from I Went to the House But Did Not Enter, a staged piece written for us by Heiner Goebbels in 2008. It was quite an experience having this piece constructed around us, like being measured for a very good suit. The work draws on texts by Eliot, Beckett, Blanchot, and, in the extract we will sing, a very short and almost comically bleak story by Kafka. It ends with what is, under the circumstances, an appropriate last line: “it’s a wonder that we don’t burst into song”.
• The Hilliard Ensemble’s final concert is at Wigmore Hall, London W1. Transeamus is available on ECM records.
