I had the great good fortune of seeing (and hearing) the King's Singers here in Mexico City on Friday night (10/21), and I have wanted to write about it since then. Sorry for having changed the format of the blog so that I, at least, could not figure how to post on it. But I figured how to change it back to a friendlier and more familiar format.
I want to respond to Todd's post "Critical Mass" from last week, and I will in the comments section, but he raised a number of important issues involving the function of music (as either entertainment or as high art). Actually we could organize an entire semester's seminar around the topics he's raised in response to Greg Sandow's chapter on "Classical vs. Popular."
I could not help but reflect on these issues while at the King'g Singers' concert. The group, which was founded in 1968, has six male singers, including two contra tenors. The members have changed over the years, but the quality of their performance over the years has remained very high, astonishingly so. Their singing on Friday night was warm and precise, thoroughly engaging and wildly appreciated by the audience about about 500 who showed up to be enchanted.
The program was devoted to a diverse group of English composers, with five groups of pieces organized by themes. The first was that of "master and student," including five pieces in the first group by Thomas Tallis and his student William Byrd (two by Tallis and three by Byrd). The second half of the program featured a group of five pieces by Edward Bairstow (2) and his student Gerald Finzi (3). The second group on the first half consisted of three pieces commissioned by the the King's Singers for the 50th Anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1952. The first half of the program closed with five arrangements of arias and ensembles from Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas. The final group of pieces were folk and popular songs in close harmony (including two songs by the Beatles).
Were this an "actual" review, I would talk more about specific pieces, but for our purposes I wanted to say that the singing was so sublime across the wide stylistic spectrum, that every piece seemed to me to be "sacred," in terms of its beauty and the skill and attention that the singers lavished on the music. One of the pieces dedicated to the Queen, believe it or not, was a humorous piece called "Mobile" that was about cell phones. It was reminiscent of Renaissance pieces like Josquin's "El Grillo," with its cricket sounds, or Jannequin's "Le chant des oiseaux," with the bird songs, but the special effects in "Mobile" are ring tones and key strokes! Silly as the subject matter is, the virtuosity of the performance commanded complete attention, if not awe.
Throughout the evening they sang with immaculate intonation and an exquisite balance between the voices. I had the sense that in every piece that ended with a sustained sonority, that I wanted it to continue forever, and that I could have just listened to them singing individual chords or vertical sonorities all evening.
The program was enormously gratifying and engaging, and was enthusiastically received, as the standing ovations at the end of the program, particularly in the second of the two encores, which was an arrangement of a beloved Mexican song, Alberto Plaza's "Aprendi di Ti," ("I learned from you"), sung in Spanish. Was this concert "popular entertainment" or serious ART? I couldn't tell. All I know is that I had many transcendent moments during the concert, times when I lost a separate sense of self in the sound. I was astonished that human beings can work together like this to produce experiences of such beauty and wonder. That's an art, and I felt blessed to be there.
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In a remarkable example of "ain't it a small world," I was talking with David Hurley (a member of the KS since 1990) after the program and mentioned that I was from UK (i.e., the "other" UK). He told me that Christopher Gabbitas's wife was from Kentucky. I mentioned to Christopher that I was from UK and he told me he met is wife, Stephanie, during when the group sang at the Singletary Center, on November 4, 2004! He had joined the group that year as well. They had a daughter, Bella, in 2009. We had a nice chat about Lexington and synchronicity. We should get him to come visit the School of Music when he is in Lexington with his wife and daughter! Anyway, it is nice to make such connections in unexpected places!
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