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In this second volume devoted to secular music, the Ensemble
vocal Aedes continues its exploration of the a cappella choral
repertoire of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Continuing along the same lines as the first volume (Ludus
verbalis, Eloquens EL1128) we have selected seven cycles in
which musical creativity centres on the word, its sonority, its
ludic aspect and its powers of evocation.
The texts are eclectic, with poems by William Butler Yeats,
Rainer Maria Rilke, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Éluard and
William Shakespeare, but also anonymous medieval English
pieces, traditional songs from Moravia, and one cycle with
texts by the composer himself.
Again, several criteria guided us in our choice: a wish to
alternate classics of the vocal repertoire with lesser-known
works (and a new one, a commission), to represent several
different countries, each with a rich choral tradition, and to
give priority to the art song.
We thought it would be interesting too to show how the
literary culture and tradition of a country can shape, inspire,
influence and sometimes dictate a mode of composition,
especially when a composer chooses pieces written in a
language that is not his own.
In Sacred and Profane by Benjamin Britten, which opens this
recording, the sacred texts, like the secular ones, are treated
in the manner of madrigals depicting human passions. This
cycle looks towards the last two volumes in this series of four,
which will be devoted to sacred music for a cappella choir.
Written a year before his death by a composer at the height
of his musical powers, Sacred and Profane is a fascinating
cycle, varied in its styles and moods. Carnal love, divine love,
country pleasures… The beautifully crafted music magnifies
the texts (both secular and sacred, in Old English), especially
in the last piece, A death, in which Benjamin Britten (1913-
1976) gives a musical account of all the stages in the death
of a man, who seems little affected by what is happening
to him!
In 2011, wishing to make our own contribution to the
continuance of the great English choral tradition, we
commissioned Philip Lawson (b. 1957) to compose a work
for us. Of this composition he wrote: ‘I have long been an
admirer of the poetry of W. B. Yeats. So when I was
approached to write a cycle of three pieces for the Ensemble
vocal Aedes, I worked on putting together a trilogy of Yeats’s
poems for the choir. My little sequence traces the love of a
man for a young lady, starting with his seeming envy of her
innocence, yet to be hurt by love. The second movement sets
Yeats’s famous poem of adoration, Had I the heav’n’s
embroidered cloths, and in the last the poet imagines the
girl as an old woman, and hopes she will remember him, the
“one man [who] loved the pilgrim soul in you”.’
When Frank Martin (1890-1974), a Swiss composer and
contemporary of Britten, composed his Songs of Ariel in
1950, he did not simply set to music excerpts from William
Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the arrangement of the English
text and its sound seem to have fired his imagination and
taken his music along the same path as the English masters,
although the musical language is distinctively his own,
based notably on a very expressive use of chromaticism. In
this opus, which makes extensive use of word-painting,