I Fagiolini assessment – startlingly intense surround-sound baroque

I Fagiolini could also be a small vocal ensemble, however their director Robert Hollingworth thinks giant, all the time pushing obstacles in an imaginative means. Their 2023 recording of song via the 17th century Orazio Benevoli – a number one composer in Rome’s post-Palestrina generation – was once a lot admired and so they’re now exploring extra of Benevoli’s lots for a couple of choirs. Bristol’s St George’s, whose gallery runs on 3 complete facets of the previous church, introduced a very good environment.

In Benevoli’s Missa Angelus Domini for 3 choirs of 4 voices – a unmarried voice to each and every section as was once the standard observe – the complexity of the interweaving traces emerged with readability, the making a song gutsy moderately than overly delicate. Individual voices had been loose to come back throughout the texture with vibrant prospers when suitable, the primacy of the textual content paramount and the 2 chamber organs and theorbo added refined element.

This programme’s general theme was once the banquet of Pentecost, with Palestrina’s motet Dum Complerentur – the mighty dashing wind of the Holy Spirit mirrored in sleek ascending words – previous Benevoli’s Missa Dum Complerentur for 4 choirs, plus 4 doubling choirs. I Fagiolini voices had been now divided into two choirs on degree and two choirs above them on each side, with the 4 additional choirs – the Bristol University Singers, schooled via Hollingworth – strategically situated across the gallery, {surround} sound baroque-style. Familiar as this could be in Venetian composers equivalent to Giovanni Gabrieli, Benevoli’s extra modernist manner obviously sought new results. The choirs’ antiphonal exchanges had been hanging, with the traces the place entries in shut imitation via the 4 doubling choirs shifting around the auditorium sounding rather magical. The cumulative surprise of the Credo’s ultimate Amen on my own felt like justification, had been it wanted, for Benevoli to be higher said.

In each those lots, Hollingworth interpolated a distinct composer between the Gloria and the Credo. Greg Skidmore was once the dramatically expressive soloist in Audio Coelum from Monteverdi’s Vespers, the echoing voice behind the gallery giving the spatial size right here. Infantas’s Loquebantur Variis Linguis for 8 voices was once a startlingly intense enjoy, once more underlining how refreshing and welcome I Fagiolini’s advocacy of such much less well known repertoire is.