The members of Trio Mediaeval like each other as much as they like what they do, which explains the infectious exuberance they bring to their performances, writes MICHAEL DERVAN.
IF YOU COULD bottle the joie de vivre that comes from the members of Trio Mediaeval you could probably sell it not just as a pick-me-up, but as some form of basic life-force. They show it in performance, through the sheer beauty of their sound, the resonance and trueness of their intonation, and the vitality they’re capable of expressing. And they showed it in person, when I met up with all three singers – Linn Andrea Fuglseth, Anna Maria Friman and Torunn Østrem Ossum – at Lorry, a fashionably arty restaurant-cum-pub (famous for the length of its international beer list, and with stuffed animals included in the decor) on the fringe of Slottsparken, the open park that surrounds the Royal Palace in Oslo.
The place was buzzing with energy (the Norwegian economy is not in recession), and my table with Trio Mediaeval erupted with regular outbursts of irrepressible laughter. The members of the trio give the impression of liking each other to an extent that’s rare in professional ensembles. And they seem to like what they do just as much as they like each other. All-female vocal trios are anything but the norm, and it would be easy to imagine Trio Mediaeval being the brainchild of a record company executive anxious to open up a new market.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The trio’s origins are altogether more mundane. Linn Andrea Fuglseth explains: “I started the group after having completed one year at the Guildhall School of Music in London, where I was studying early music. I had a lot of nice pieces with me, especially three-part pieces that I liked. I had just had my first child, and didn’t know what to do as a singer. As an educated singer it was hard to know what my job might be. I was sitting there with my daughter, a half-a-year old, with all this music lying around that I really wanted to try out.
“So I thought I’d find some nice people and just get together and sing some of this music. So I asked Torunn, whom I had known singing in choirs for 15 years at that time. And I had just recently met Anna in the Norwegian Soloists Choir, where we had a good time together. I really liked her, even though I didn’t know her very much. The ambition was just to meet and try things out, and of course it would have been good if it was possible to get some . . . ” she hesitates before saying the word, “money,” – it’s followed by gales of communal laughter – “out of singing.”
Having mentioned money, she’s careful to point out that it certainly wasn’t at the core of the initial idea, and Anna interjects to point out, “If you hadn’t asked me, I’d still be like an educated singer not knowing what to do”.
“We really hit it off as a group,” says Linn, “and as good friends as well. And as it happens, all of us were able to spend some time with the group when we found it was working well. Because Torunn was also home, with her three children, and Anna was studying in Oslo at the time and was free to do some projects outside of the conservatory. We started to rehearse 12 or 15 hours a week.”
One of their crucial early decisions was to attend the summer school run by the leading vocal group, the Hilliard Ensemble. At the time the trio’s repertoire was tiny, some 40 minutes, says Linn (quickly corrected by the other two to 35), and they were apprehensive about how they might get on. But everyone who heard them was delighted. The Hilliards loved their sound, helped them to find new repertoire, and encouraged them to stick with it.
AS A GROUP with medieval in their name and a repertoire which is split between the very early and the contemporary, their attitude towards performing style is anything but dogmatic. They make rehearsals sound more like fun than work. “We talk a lot about everything except for the music,” says Anna. “Because, the music happens very much on intuition. When we rehearse, we sing a song once, and we might say a few things, and then we sing it again, and by singing it we find ways of doing things. When we speak, it’s more about life, really.” And the talking, I’m told (to much laughter), genuinely takes up far more time than the singing.
“It’s nice,” says Linn, “that the music actually works without having to talk it to death, you know. Of course, in the beginning we had to find out who should sing which part, and what sounded good, what were the strengths of each voice.”
None of the three seems to like the idea of having their voices (or anyone else’s) labelled as soprano or mezzo soprano, let alone the complicated subdivisions of voice type that are still standard in the world of opera, especially in Germany.
Torunn is the singer who most easily extends down into mezzo soprano territory. But her answer is strange when I phrase a question to ask if she’d be looking for mezzo soprano material if she wasn’t singing in the group. “Well, maybe not. Maybe I wouldn’t be doing any professional singing if I didn’t sing with these guys. I was educated as a teacher for kindergarten. So I had been working as a teacher for nine years when we started the group.”
Anna, the one Swedish member of the trio, quotes a Norwegian saying, “sing, sing, sing and be happy – sing with the voice that you have”, to clarify their position. She herself, she points out, used to be categorised as a lyric mezzo, and Linn as a soubrette. It’s Linn who explains why they used to be called a trio of sopranos. The music they sang in the beginning was music she had discovered during her studies at the Guildhall, “and in my class there were nine sopranos and one countertenor. So we found a lot of pieces that we could actually sing as an ensemble of soprano voices, even though some of them sang sort of low and some of them sang the middle range.”
In spite of the name, the members of Trio Mediaeval don’t see themselves primarily as performers of early music, and they certainly don’t see themselves as purists when it comes to interpreting early music. “It’s not really about early music, authenticity or HIP [Historically Informed Performance],” says Anna. “It’s about ensemble singing and great music. We only sing pieces we like. We’re not trying to recreate a certain sound which might sound close to a possible original medieval singing style. There is no way we can know what the singing and phrasing sounded like in the Middle Ages.”
The voices that were early inspirations for them – including the Consort of Musicke with Emma Kirkby and Anonymous 4 as well as the Hilliard Ensemble – are all strongly identified with early music and Kirkby has long been an icon of period performance practice.
Grex Vocalis, the choir Linn and Torunn sang in, was also an important influence. “The choir was really into singing straight tones, no vibrato,” says Torunn. “We sang quite a lot of baroque and renaissance music,” adds Linn, “and the conductor Carl Høgset is known for working with voices in a way that feels very natural. His way of explaining how to use the voice was a lot easier for me to understand than what they taught me at the conservatory, actually. A much more healthy way of looking at it.”
“My voice has become much more fun by singing in a vocal ensemble,” says Anna. “I was kind of lucky. I had a singing teacher who supported me singing in choirs and ensembles, but many of my fellow students were told that that it could harm their voices. Many institutions are very restrictive. It may not appear like that when you are a student. But when you think back, you don’t really have many options. You have to be incredibly strong. I would encourage everyone interested in singing ensemble music to go and do it. And you do not have to tell your singing teacher about it.”
LINN PINPOINTS the sort of restriction Anna is talking about. Fifteen years ago she wanted to apply to do a master’s degree with a vocal group as a chamber music project. “They said it’s not possible to do this chamber music project when you are a singer. That’s quite funny now, when we’ve been Grammy-nominated for ‘best chamber music performance’ for our folk songs CD.”
Folk-song arrangements are an important strand of the trio’s work, as is new music. And the new music was in there from the start, if only just. The Hilliard summer schools have composers in residence, and, says Linn, the composers “just came and asked if they could write for us. Ivan Moody was the first. When we started, we only wanted to do medieval music and some Norwegian folk songs and medieval Norwegian ballads. The summer school said we had to do some contemporary piece, and at first we were actually very annoyed that we had to do that.”
They found the shortest pieces they could in order to meet the requirement. “But then when people wrote these beautiful pieces for us . . . ” The composers have tended to take inspiration directly from the sound world of the trio’s performances of medieval music. And the singers are not complaining. “It’s very melodic contemporary music,” says Anna. “We like lines and nice harmonies. I love contemporary music that’s really difficult – when I don’t have to do it myself.”
The repertoire between early and contemporary they leave to other people (though Torunn, say the others, is a fabulous “opera imitator”). And their approach to contemporary music is not as conservative as they make it sound. They’ve been involved in a “contemporary oratorio” project with Germany’s musikFabrik ensemble and the New York-based Bang on a Can composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe.
For some of their performances at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, they will be joined by players with a jazz background, percussionist Terje Isungset, and trumpeter Arve Henriksen. Not only will contemporary music be on the menu, but also improvisations. And in November, they’ll be working at Carnegie Hall with the Bang on a Can All-Stars in a Steel Hammer project, celebrating the American folk hero, John Henry.
“We’ve been around for 12 years,” Anna points out, “which is a long time for a female trio. But it still feels as if we are at the start of doing something.”
Linn laughs. “It’s like we’re still young and promising.”
Trio Mediaeval will perform at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival from Monday to Thursday next week. The festival runs from this Saturday until Sunday, July 5. Michael Dervan travelled to Oslo courtesy of the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Dublin
