Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y.; December 22, 2009
It isn’t easy to present a program of Christmas music most of which will be new to admirers of the genre, particularly the sophisticated crowd that shows up at the Met’s Medieval Sculpture Hall year after year for just such events. The six men who comprise the group Lionheart, however, always surprise, and they did again Tuesday evening with a program entitled “Tydings Trew: Feasts of Christmas in Medieval England.” The nineteen carols, motets, antiphons, hymns and canticles took precisely an hour to perform and they were a perfect match for their surroundings, with the Museum’s huge Christmas tree and well-populated Nativity Scene beneath.
Lionheart loves to experiment with space, and even their first piece, a Sarum Chant, was begun outside the hall; they entered, semi-circled the audience and marched down the center aisle intoning the austere work. This, and other such re-arrangements, allows the listeners to concentrate on each voice as it passes by and then hear it recede. It offers a fine perception. The men break into groups occasionally: The carol “As I outrode this endres night” featured only three voices: the countertenor, bass and tenor. Utter clarity and simplicity were the object here and it was fun to hear the men sonically three octaves apart at times, with an anchor in the middle. In a call-and-response work, “Benedicite omnia opera domini domino,” one tenor stood at the left and sang a verse and the other five men, stage right, repeated it. Though many of the works were simple, i.e: required little in the way of complex polyphony, the motet “Gaude virgo mater Christi” showed the group at its most ornate. In the remarkably moving “A, my dere, a my dere son,” a lullaby sung by Mary to Jesus in which she explains how He came about, the second lengthy verse switches to Jesus’s perspective, with Him telling her what His fate will be. This also required some vocal juggling, which the men handled with their customary sensitivity and skill.
Suffice it to say that the performance was up to Lionheart’s usual standards, which is to say, above criticism. They sing clearly and crisply, in this case, enunciating the medieval texts with clarity if somewhat eccentrically (the letter “i” was offered as an almost Gaelic “ouy”) which one can only assume was well researched. The hall’s acoustics did not let them down.
Robert Levine
