I Fagiolini – Shaping the Invisible

St Mary in the Castle, 18 October 2019

I first came across I Fagiolini at the Worcester Three Choirs Festival in 1997 where they were singing with the Sdasa Chorale. I recall it well and still have the CD they issued at the time. Since then the group, which originated in Oxford, have had many changes of personnel but Robert Hollingworth is still very much the guiding light for the ensemble and tenor Nicholas Hurndall Smith is still with them.

Shaping the Invisible, which they are currently touring, is a departure from the conventional concert as it is based around the creative life of Leonardo da Vinci, with Professor Martin Kemp introducing the large scale projections of paintings and drawings, before Robert Hollingworth provides the links to what we are about the hear. Most of the time these links make very good sense, with some very beautiful liturgical settings by Tallis, Josquin and Victoria. There are also some surprising comic elements with Janequin’s La Guerre and Vecchi’s Daspuoche stabilao. Modern items sneak in from Howells and Rubbra, and the rich harmonies of Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur’s La Voix du Bien-Aime where religious intensity verges on the erotic.

All of this flowed effortlessly and with consummate artistry from all concerned. It was a pity that the final musical setting by Adrian Williams was so stylistically divorced from the rest of the programme. Where virtually all that we had heard required close harmony and beauty of line, Williams fragmented ideas, spoken passages and unstructured narrative seemed a strange place to leave us. As Robert Hollingworth had a slight throat problem the encore was dropped and this might have cheered us up again but by now it was too late and a fine evening left a slightly bitter taste.

I Fagiolini run workshops today (Saturday) and the final event in this year’s HEMF is at the Kino Teatr Sunday afternoon with the Consone Quartet at 3.00pm.