40 years is a pretty long time to have an affiliation, whether it be in a job, a marriage, or otherwise. One case in point is the British countertenor David James, who has sung with the UK vocal group The Hilliard Ensemble since its founding in 1973. In fact, James is the only original member to have stayed with the group all this time. That came to an end this evening just a few hours ago, when The Hilliard Ensemble gave its last-ever concert at Wigmore Hall in London. One can only imagine what emotions ran on stage and in the hall. More (sort of) below ye flippe.....
Of course, the concert was long sold-out, given that the Hilliard Ensemble announced a year ago that they were calling it quits after 40 years. There was a story on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday last year with David James being interviewed by Arun Rath, which covered this announcement. James noted that around the time of the start of The Hilliard Ensemble:
"....we had no sort of plan - should we say grand plan - that, oh, we're going to form this group and we're going to conquer the world singing this music.
There was a great - certainly in the U.K., there was a flood, suddenly, of singers coming from Oxford and Cambridge who seemed to be veering towards singing this music from the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries. And it all somehow gelled together all the different groups. And suddenly the explosion started. I mean, this chap I mentioned, David Munrow, he was given his own radio program on the BBC, a daily program. It was called the Pied Piper - I mean, literally every day - and he thrilled audiences.
Suddenly, people perk up and say, gosh, this is absolutely fantastic. And so we were very fortunate. We were right at the beginning of this. And I'm so glad. I mean, 10 years earlier, I think we might never have started, shall I say."
Perhaps the most celebrated collaboration that The Hilliard Ensemble enjoyed was with the saxophonist Jan Garbarek, which James somewhat snarkily reacted to at one point in the interview with Rath:
"RATH: I want to talk about another one of your collaborations that was very celebrated with Jan Garbarek, the saxophonist. How did that come about?
JAMES: How did I guess you'd be asking that?
(laughter)
RATH: So retrospective. Of course.
JAMES: Oh, well - I'd have been surprised if you hadn't."
But there's good reason why Rath asked, as James noted in
this article from this past March in
The Guardian, where he writes about the first encounter of The Hilliard Ensemble with Garbarek at the St. Gerold monastery in Switzerland (
emphasis mine):
"It is now 21 years since the four members of the Hilliard Ensemble found ourselves there on a musical blind date with saxophonist Jan Garbarek - an artistic experiment that was the brainchild of our producer, Manfred Eicher at ECM Records. Apprehensive, we waited nervously for a while wondering how to proceed, until we decided to just do what we do: sing. So we began a long, slow homophonic funeral motet by Spanish composer, Cristobel Morales, expecting Jan would listen and then respond in some way. As we were nearing the end, I felt a deep shuddering vibration, as if at sea on a ferry, a sensation that swiftly became an explosion of interweaving ethereal sounds. Jan had grasped his saxophone and introduced a fifth voice. It was the most magical musical moment in my entire 40-year career with the Hilliard Ensemble.
That day was the beginning of a profound and lasting relationship. When we finished the piece, no one in the chapel moved or made a sound. Then Eicher leapt from his seat and said: 'We have to record it!' We reconvened two months later to record Officium, the album that sold over a million copies and has for 20 years been opening doors for us to magnificent venues throughout the world."
You have to remember that a million seller in classical music is shockingly high, whereas Beyoncé or Lady Gaga can sell a million albums in a week (for those who still buy albums, that is), especially for an album that isn't lowest common denominator or otherwise. Regarding
Officium in particular, I didn't actually listen to it until this year. To be honest, while all the musicians are wonderful, I guess the overall feel struck me as too "New Age-y" for my taste. But again, this was not a "dumbing down" type of classical or
faux-classical album, but one made by serious artists who saw something in each other at the time, and obviously kept the artistic relationship going. However, it kind of wound up in just that kind of "New Age-y" pigeonhole, as
this March 2014 article from the Scottish newspaper
The Herald noted, which the group's baritone Gordon Jones tried in his small way to counter-act:
'Jones says he used to go into music shops and physically move their records from cross-over and new-age sections. "I would take our albums and put them somewhere else in the shop. Classical, jazz - I didn't really care. Anything except cross-over or new-age.'"
James also noted in that
Guardian piece, regading working with Garbarek:
"What still staggers me, even now, is that Jan has never once looked at a single piece of the music we sing. All he wants to know is what key it's in; he listens to us, and then as long as he can find a way in, he joins in. His extraordinary improvising liberated us too; after working with him we were no longer static in front of our music stands, but are frequently to be found wandering round the churches and cathedrals without scores, as he does."
Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble gave their last concert together at Cambridge University a few weeks ago (pdf flyer
here. A past member of The Hilliard Ensemble, tenor John Potter, returned as a guest artist for that concert, and blogged about it
here, where he starts with the audience reception at the end:
"The audience were so quiet if we hadn’t been able to see (and even touch them) we wouldn’t have known they were there. After the last chord of 'Parce Mihi' had drifted up into the chapel vaulting and disappeared the silence enveloped us all. Time seemed to stop. Then the audience erupted like a football crowd."
Regarding the Wigmore Hall concert this past evening, Gordon Jones noted in
this article from
The Guardian yesterday about planning this final concert:
"We were also keen to include a few pieces written for us by composers who will also be in attendance."
From the Wigmore Hall listing, the four contemporary composers on their program(me) are:
(1) Piers Hellawell
(2) Arvo Pärt
(3) Roger Marsh
(4) Heiner Goebbels
It'll have to wait until the reviews to find out which of these 4, or perhaps all 4, composers were present. I would imagine that all 4 would be there, in principle. Speaking particularly of Arvo Pärt, James also reminisced in his Guardian write-up:
"On a dreary September day we arrived at a remote East London church for a fairly routine BBC recording of some small sacred works by a then relatively unknown Estonian composer Arvo Pärt - only to find Pärt himself in attendance with Manfred. He wandered around shredding small sheets of paper from on high while we sang, and the church lit up with the shining purity of his music. We all felt as if we had been born to sing these glorious pieces our whole lives. He felt this too and paid us the greatest compliment by saying, in his characteristically quiet way, that we sang the music exactly as he heard it in his head when he composed it. He has inspired and influenced us in sometimes unusual ways and taught us not to be afraid of silence - it is as important as the notes themselves; musicians are all too often afraid of embracing that."
With the end now having come, James addressed the question of why quit somewhat pithily in his
Guardian article, but with more strain in the interview with Rath:
Guardian: "So why are we retiring? With Gordon (Jones), Rogers and me now in our 60s, we began to wonder what should become of the Hilliards. Steven (Harrold), who joined 15 years ago and is our youngest member, wasn't keen on the idea of three new colleagues – and would it really then be the Hilliard Ensemble? The toughest option was to have a cut-off date."
NPR: "RATH: You're still so passionate about the music. I can hear it in your voice. What's retirement going to look like for you? Or is it really retirement?
JAMES: Oh, it is, unfortunately. I mean, I'm dreading it. Half of me is really looking forward to this in terms of the fact that we're going to be singing a lot of the music that's dearest to our hearts. But the thought that after the end of next year I won't be able to sing it anymore is devastating. I mean, these guys, we spent our lives together, the four of us. And we love singing together. And so it's going to be an enormous wrench. But, you know, we've got to do it. I mean, you just can't sort of go on forever, you know? And so the decision is made, and I'm going to stick by it."
From that
Herald article, Rogers Covey-Crump is quoted:
'So the obvious question: why end it?
"And the obvious answer is, well, age," says tenor Rogers Covey-Crump. "We started talking about it a few years ago. Three of us are getting on. Sure, we could pass on the baton to Steven (Harrold, the other tenor and the youngest of the group) and he could keep the Hilliard name going like a kind of franchise. But to replace three quarters of the group all at once? It would not really be the same Hilliard Ensemble afterwards."
Having decided to quit, next they had to figure out how to go about it. The classical industry tends to work a year or two in advance so breaking up takes significant forethought. "The 40th anniversary seemed a natural end point," says James. "By focusing on our birthday we have been able to stay positive rather than gloomy."
Granted, if you look at their
concert calendar, you can see:
"2015
Who knows?"
I can imagine that one or several of them will continue solo projects, and I can't imagine that as individual artists, they won't get offers to work elsewhere. They might even keep in touch and work together in pairs or other combinations, but without the Hilliard "brand-name". One can only hope so.
I once saw The Hilliard Ensemble way back in the mid 1990's or so, when they visited STL and sang at Washington University as part of their Ovations! series. I don't have the program in front of me, so I don't remember who exactly was in the group, besides obviously David James, of course. Edison Theatre doesn't have the best acoustic, and perhaps Graham Chapel would have been a stereotypically more "fitting" venue, except that Edison Theatre has better backstage facilities, of course. I only have the most general memory that it was a fine concert, but I would have to dig out the program to see if it jogged any more memories. In any case, this clearly ended up as the only time that I saw them live. Just speaking for myself, I certainly send the members of The Hilliard Ensemble best wishes for the next part of their journey as individual musicians, and thanks for what they've given the world for 40 years.
Some video samples of their artistry, in collaboration with other musicians:
With that, you can, as per usual with these 'hybrid' diaries:
(a) Comment on the subject in question (hmm, what a thought), or:
(b) Observe the standard SNLC protocol.
Or for indecisive types (e.g. 3CM), you can do both. We're open-minded here :) .