THIS YEAR, 2012, may or may not turn out to be the end of the Mayan calendar, and thus of life as we know it – but already it is turning out to be a year of endless anniversaries. Just try to avoid the words “Dickens” and “Titanic” for the next month or so, and you’ll see what I mean.
Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll unearth anniversaries of the more surprising kind. This year, for example, marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Giovanni Gabrieli, a composer whose name has fallen off the radar nowadays but who was something of a legend in his own Renaissance lifetime.
Gabrieli produced a soundtrack for the city of Venice at a time when it was not simply a tourist attraction, but a major player in global politics. Peter Ackroyd captures the zeitgeist in his biography Venice: Pure City. “Since Venice was the pre-eminent exponent of ordered governance in the world, it was only natural that music should emanate from it,” he writes. “It contained the music of the spheres. It partook of heaven and of earth. The gates of paradise had opened in the city.
“All the various forms of constitution – monarchy, oligarchy and republic - were moulded and mingled together. These were celestial harmonies, imparted by God.”
At the basilica of San Marco, strategically located right next door to the Doge’s palace, Masses lasted for many hours. Ceremonial processions carried the spectacle into the square outside; inside, the church had no fewer than four organs, just in case the occasion demanded an extra bit of welly.
This sumptuous sound-world is to be recreated throughout February at City Hall in Dublin, in a mini-festival of three 6.30pm concerts entitled Sacred Symphonies, by the Irish choral group Resurgam under the baton of its director Mark Duley. Gabrieli, Duley explains, stands at the high point of a polychoral tradition in which multiple choirs and orchestras batted the sound around the interior space. It was all highly symbolic: the harmonies of Venetian governance writ large – sometimes very large – in sound.
“The republic of Venice was a mini-empire with huge importance and wealth, and a great military and naval force as well. And then at its heart, there was this great independent political culture with the Doge and these wonderful ceremonials, which magnified and clarified the special relationship between politics and the church at the time.”
Essentially we’re talking music in 3D; an effect which will be replicated under the dome at City Hall, with the audience seated amongst groups of musicians so that the action takes place, literally, all around. “There’s one piece where we’ve got seven choirs,” says Duley.
“So it’s great fun deciding who can do what – and there’s huge opportunity for bringing the work to life in lots of different ways. You can have an array of colour throughout the choir.
“He was writing for a rather different sort of choral world from the one that we know. It was one where the voices would be as virtuosic and as colourful as the instruments – so there was a sort of level playing field for both singers and instrumentalists.”
The series has been carefully tailored to give a flavour of Gabrieli’s work throughout his career, and to fit him into the context of European music as a whole. “His earlier music is more in tune with the 16th-century polyphonic ideal,” Duley explains, “whereas at the end of his life you’ve got all the elements of the early Baroque, where the text begins to take priority. We’ve designed the programmes to illustrate that. People can walk the path, as it were.”
The first concert, on February 4th, has music by Gabrieli’s predecessors at St Mark’s – and also by Orlando de Lassus, with whom Gabrieli studied in Munich, and whose name is familiar in Ireland thanks to the work of another choral group, the Lassus Scholars. The second programme looks at Gabrieli’s musical legacy – he was a great teacher himself, and one of his most celebrated pupils, Heinrich Schütz, spread his influence throughout northern Europe.
The final night will provide musical fireworks in the shape of Gabrieli’s massive Sacred Symphony of 1615. All three concerts will feature the period-instrument Irish Baroque Orchestra and a visiting group of period brass players from London. “We haven’t got period brass here yet,” Duley explains, “so we’re bringing over the players of Quintessential, which will give us the wonderful sonorities of the sackbuts and cornets.
“I think that will be another revelation for people. We’re so used to brass, in an orchestral sense, being the heavy hitters of the orchestra – but in this music they are consort players, and one brass player will balance perfectly with one singer or one violin. Or one recorder, even. So it’s a much more intimate way of making music, with this idea that everything is in balance; that no one part or one instrument is necessarily louder than another.”
The aim, for Gabrieli and his contemporaries, was to simulate the perfect order of the Venetian world. But for us listeners, remembering this figure from the dusty pages of music history also offers a great early-evening escape into the realms of heavenly harmonics.