A passionate voice for early music

Soprano Emma Kirkby hasn't set out to campaign for Baroque music, but she is an impressive ambassador, writes Eileen Battersby.

English soprano Emma Kirkby could probably inspire a full choir to sing in torrential rain on a mountain top - and any audience will be delighted to join her in the climb. Joyful is the word which best describes her approach to music. It also defines her distinctive, soaring, youthful voice, its beauty well served by the clarity, musicality and the purity of her intelligent phrasing. Her appearance in the opening concert on September 14th with the Irish Baroque Orchestra (led by Lucy van Dael) at the East Cork Early Music Festival in a programme of Bach, Handel and Telemann will set the scene for what promises to be a feast of Baroque splendours.

No singer does finer service to the glories of that glorious repertoire. Travelling the world, singing and engaging with her art, she makes one think of a troubadour, although she laughs at the analogy.

Kirby performs incessantly because she loves singing and working with other musicians. She reckons she won't really set about travelling until her son, now 17, is "grown". She may regard her travelling to date as "limited", yet she has performed with the finest of international period ensembles and baroque orchestras and choirs. She is a Baroque superstar with a vast following.

Level-headed and clear-thinking, she also has passion, flair, subtle technique and individuality, whether singing Monteverdi or Vivaldi, Hildegard von Bingen, Bach or Handel, or English composers such as John Dowland or Purcell.

Kirkby is an Oxford classics graduate, and as East Cork Early Music Festival founder, the outstanding American viola da gamba player Sarah Cunningham, says, "Emma has this incredible mind". Yet Kirkby never plays the tortured artist, and avoids sounding academic. She exudes warmth, using her knowledge to explain, and interpret - not intimidate.

For her, music is fun. "It's a privilege to be able to sing this wonderful music; I love performing. The English choral tradition is very strong. We have lots of amateur choirs who sing for fun and take it very seriously."

Emma Kirkby, OBE, has released more than 100 recordings of music spanning the Renaissance and Baroque periods and on to the modern repertoire, including Stravinsky, although for a long time she remained strictly within her chosen period and did not venture beyond work written after 1791 - the year Mozart died. Once she decided to explore, she engaged with many different types of music, including the songs of the American composer Amy Beach.

For all her recording work, which she enjoys, Kirkby still prefers live performance. Having had to cancel her performance in the MBNA Shannon International Music Festival in July, she is returning to Ireland in September for what promises to be an outstanding event, the East Cork Early Music Festival. Now in its third year, this festival and similar events underline the fact that no performers in the arts consistently serve their audience as generously as do classical musicians, who perform to the highest standards and often before very small audiences.

Kirkby is singing Bach's exuberant Cantata BWV 51, Jauchzet Gott in Allen and Handel's Cantata Tra le fiamme. It was Kirkby who sang in the world premiere recording on March 5th 2001 of Handel's Gloria, following the discovery of this previously unknown masterwork and, as with Vivaldi, she has a particular affinity with the cosmopolitan German who was as at home in Italian and English as much as German.

But the Bach piece is special for her. "I love it. I have been singing it for, well, forever. It is wonderful, written in praise of God and thanking him. It is very showy, with these marvellous trumpet passages, and exciting duets between trumpet and voice, yet I think its heart is the middle section, it's very intimate, very intense and there's this feeling, this expression of . . . thankfulness."

The exuberance of the cantata is reflected by that of her voice. Text has always been important to her. "The composers of the Baroque period were very good on text and took it seriously." She sees the words and the music as working together. "The text is important, not secondary."

Her knowledge of Latin brings the music that bit closer to her. For one recording of Vivaldi cantatas, Kirkby translated the composer's Latin text. She brings this authority to her work without sounding dangerously clever.

Her speaking voice is strongly English West Country with traces of Wales. "My father was in the Royal Navy, so I grew up all over the place. I went to six schools. But we tended to stay close enough to Dorset" - and the sea.

Born in Surrey in 1949, Kirkby has a sister, and describes her not particularly musical family as having "a good appreciation of music". Much has been made of her having played the piano, but as she says, "I had lessons, I just wasn't all that good" (her laugh seems to suggest that many erstwhile piano students have had similar experiences).

Then she adds helpfully, "I learnt the flute as well for a while, but I always liked singing, it's very sociable, and I went to schools where choir was important - and where Latin was taught well. At one of my schools, the headmistress's daughter had had a first in Classics at Oxford and came back to the school to teach riding - and this was fine as long as she also taught Latin . . . As I got on well in Latin, the same teacher decided she would teach me some Greek as well."

As a sixth former at school she joined a madrigal group. At Oxford she sang with an early music group and her initial pleasure in singing with a small intimate ensemble intensified. She also became with involved with Andrew Parrott's Taverner Choir. But it was still a hobby. "I started out as a teacher. Singing professionally was not something I had even thought about."

It was the early 1970s and Anthony Rooley was searching for the right soprano for his newly formed group, the Consort of Musicke. Kirkby's voice was ideally suited for the period instruments. She sang with the group yet quickly emerged as a soloist, and also began appearing with Christopher Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music. Over the years she has also performed regularly with the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment, the Monteverdi Choir and John Elliot Gardiner's English Baroque Soloists.

The music of Monteverdi and Vivaldi has always appealed to her, and although most of Bach's church cantatas have echoes of Italian forms, as evident from the use of recitative and da capo arias, few are quite as Italianate as Cantata No 51. It is a sound well suited to her voice. She agrees but adds that she can "change to suit a German piece sung in the Lutheran style".

She agrees there are tonal shifts and the Italian repertoire does tend to favour a heightened flamboyance.

In common with every musician, she speaks about the various challenges music presents for the performer. "There is always the challenge, but when you consider Bach, we all know he's brilliant, you can't get any better. He is the best."

Although later adapted for Michaelmas, Cantata No 51 was not written for a specific feast. Believed to have been first performed on September 17th, 1730, the virtuosic solo part was sung by a 12-year-old boy. The opening lines, "Acclaim God in all lands!/Let all that in Heaven and Earth/has been created/exalt His glory;/and we wish to bring our God/an offering too . . . " is matched by the delighted "Alleluia!" at the close.

Opera has never tempted her. "I think you just decide your place. Opera never attracted me, although I have to say I do like the way opera is being performed now."

Why has it taken general modern audiences so long to appreciate the beauties of Baroque? "I don't know," she pauses, and suggests it may be due to the various schools disagreeing about specialisation and the use of period instruments. There was also an element of defensive territorialism. Although she has contributed hugely to the belated popularity of what is a tremendously rich and diverse repertoire, she says she never set out to campaign for the music. "I think people should just decide what they like, or don't like."

But Kirkby is delighted with the far wider audience it has won. "Baroque music is exciting. There's a confidence about it as well as a sense of order. These composers had an understanding of rhetoric. There was also of course, their sense of God, which is much stronger than we have now. I'm not particularly religious but you can't but notice their spirituality."

She refers to the intellectual cohesion they brought to their music. "There's an understanding, a value put on the text, it's not simply serving the music. I think also they recognised that music, for all its pleasure, is a deeply serious business. It really does affect us - these early composers knew that music works upon the body like medicine. "

If Baroque music took a long time to reach the wider audience, Kirby has no fears for its future. "There is such a lot of talent coming up, the younger generation of Baroque musicians and singers are very good. They have such a good grasp of how this music can be played. It is" - and she again calls upon a word that best describes the genius of Baroque music - "exciting".

Kirkby is right. Not only is there a wealth of great standard pieces in the repertoire there is so much more yet to discover about, and delight in, early music.

* The East Cork Early Music Festival runs Sept 14-18 Booking 021-4636761 or Info@eastcorkearly music.ie