Lammermuir Festival: Monteverdi Vespers

St Mary’s Church, Haddington, 7/9/2025

I Fagiolini, English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble

Robert Hollingworth (conductor)

 After the delicious performance of Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ last night, Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini joined forces with the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble to bring us the 1610 Vespers of Claudio Monteverdi, in the superb setting of St Mary’s Church in Haddington, Scotland’s longest church.

If we are to believe the apocryphal story, the group founded by Robert Hollingworth in 1986 chose their name, ‘I Fagiolini’ (the green beans), because many of the performers of early music at that time were living an alternative lifestyle of yoghurt, green beans and pulses, and were into home knitting (and that’s just the men!). It was only later they discovered that the same word has rather rude connotations in Italian (Robert has admitted that they perform seldom in Italy!).

It was Italian music that they were playing tonight, and they managed to conjure up a fairly Mediterranean sound world for our delectation. The group is preparing to record the Vespers in the near future, and this was a good live test run for them, in front of a capacity audience at the Lammermuir Festival. There was a palpable sense of excitement in the audience before the concert, as the Vespers are not performed that often, and we knew we were about to witness a carefully edited version with one voice to a part and similarly, one instrument to a part. I was slightly worried that the work would be underpowered, especially in this big space, but on the whole, my fears were allayed.

We often think of the Vespers as the work most associated with St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, and indeed it sounds fabulous there, but Mr Hollingworth reminded us that the work was published four years before Monteverdi took up his post as Maestro di Cappella there.

Even before we started, it was important to discover that, for this performance and the coming recording, the chamber organ was tuned to a tone higher than modern pitch, but certain other movements (most notably the voices only sections) were tuned down to a more suitable singing pitch. Similarly, I Fagiolini have stayed faithful to the hints in the music itself, of time signatures different from what we are used to. In particular, several sections seemed much more expansive that usual. I have no problems with this whatsoever, as nearly all the music of this period was haphazardly noted down, allowing clever modern musicologists and performers to experiment.

I only ever sang in the Vespers once in my 40 year career, as most of the low voice music was too high for me. Listening tonight, particularly to the Magnificat at the end, which was at a significantly lower pitch, made me think what I had missed out on. I was at least lucky that I sang on the brilliant recording of Monteverdi’s ‘Coronation of Poppea’ in 1986, conducted by Richard Hickox, with wonderful singers like Arleen Auger, James Bowman and Gregory Reinhart. That was a thrill!

Tonight’s performance had so many thrilling moments – the opening chorus with full voices and the cornetts and sackbuts in magnificent form made a stunning lift off.

A brief explanation of cornetts and sackbuts: these were the precursors of modern brass instruments, although the cornett is a wooden instrument thought to have evolved from fingered cow horns. Its peak was from approximately 1550-1650, and it was praised as loud as a trumpet but soft as a recorder. Used primarily in theatre and ecclesiastical music of the time, it was superseded by the brass trumpet with its much more thrilling sound, but it is the sound of the Vespers par excellence, brilliantly played by Gawain Glenton, Conor Hastings and David Brutti. The sackbut is a much more direct ancestor of the modern trombone, and we heard Emily White, Tom Lees and Adrian France playing with sonorous virtuosity.

The singing was largely excellent  - Three tenor virtuosity in Duo Seraphim from Nicholas Mulroy, Hugo Hymas and Matthew Long, a beautiful Audi Coelum from Greg Skidmore, and glorious soprano intertwining between Julia Doyle and Ciara Hendrick. I would have loved a little more Italian brio, and I hope they can find that in the recording. It may be baroque music but it was originally sung by Italians with the flair and flamboyance of that country, and it’s well worth going for a bit of that Pavarotti magic! I would also have preferred another couple of sopranos to fill out the sound. The ladies did a fantastic job, but with so many male voices under them, I feel that another two or three sopranos would have made the sound even more exciting.

The large audience made their way home from St Mary’s buoyed by the memory of an exceptional performance.

Photo credit: Matthew Brodie