I Fagiolini assessment – startlingly intense surround-sound baroque | Classical music

I Fagiolini could also be a small vocal ensemble, however their director Robert Hollingworth thinks large, at all times pushing boundaries in an imaginative method. Their 2023 recording of music by the seventeenth century Orazio Benevoli – a number one composer in Rome’s post-Palestrina period – was a lot admired they usually’re now exploring extra of Benevoli’s plenty for a number of choirs. Bristol’s St George’s, whose gallery runs on three full sides of the previous church, supplied a wonderful setting.

In Benevoli’s Missa Angelus Domini for 3 choirs of 4 voices – a single voice to every half as was the standard observe – the complexity of the interweaving strains emerged with readability, the singing gutsy slightly than overly refined. Particular person voices had been free to return by means of the feel with vibrant prospers when applicable, the primacy of the textual content paramount and the 2 chamber organs and theorbo added refined element.

This programme’s total theme was the feast of Pentecost, with Palestrina’s motet Dum Complerentur – the mighty dashing wind of the Holy Spirit mirrored in sleek ascending phrases – previous Benevoli’s Missa Dum Complerentur for 4 choirs, plus 4 doubling choirs. I Fagiolini voices had been now divided into two choirs on stage and two choirs above them on both facet, with the 4 additional choirs – the Bristol College Singers, schooled by Hollingworth – strategically positioned across the gallery, {surround} sound baroque-style. Acquainted as this could be in Venetian composers reminiscent of Giovanni Gabrieli, Benevoli’s extra modernist method clearly sought new results. The choirs’ antiphonal exchanges had been putting, with the strains the place entries in shut imitation by the 4 doubling choirs shifting around the auditorium sounding fairly magical. The cumulative surprise of the Credo’s closing Amen alone felt like justification, had been it wanted, for Benevoli to be higher acknowledged.

In each these plenty, Hollingworth interpolated a special composer between the Gloria and the Credo. Greg Skidmore was the dramatically expressive soloist in Audio Coelum from Monteverdi’s Vespers, the echoing voice in the back of the gallery giving the spatial dimension right here. Infantas’s Loquebantur Variis Linguis for eight voices was a startlingly intense expertise, once more underlining how refreshing and welcome I Fagiolini’s advocacy of such much less well-known repertoire is.