I Fagiolini review – startlingly intense surround-sound baroque
I Fagiolini may be a small vocal ensemble, but their director Robert Hollingworth thinks big, always pushing boundaries in an imaginative way. Their 2023 recording of music by the 17th century Orazio Benevoli – a leading composer in Rome's post-Palestrina era – was much admired and they're now exploring more of Benevoli's masses for multiple choirs. Bristol's St George's, whose gallery runs on three full sides of the former church, offered an excellent setting.
In Benevoli's Missa Angelus Domini for three choirs of four voices – a single voice to each part as was the usual practice – the complexity of the interweaving lines emerged with clarity, the singing gutsy rather than overly refined. Individual voices were free to come through the texture with colourful flourishes when appropriate, the primacy of the text paramount and the two chamber organs and theorbo added subtle detail.
This programme's overall theme was the feast of Pentecost, with Palestrina's motet Dum Complerentur – the mighty rushing wind of the Holy Spirit reflected in graceful ascending phrases – preceding Benevoli's Missa Dum Complerentur for four choirs, plus four doubling choirs. I Fagiolini voices were now divided into two choirs on stage and two choirs above them on either side, with the four further choirs – the Bristol University Singers, schooled by Hollingworth – strategically positioned around the gallery, surround sound baroque-style. Familiar as this might be in Venetian composers such as Giovanni Gabrieli, Benevoli's more modernist approach clearly sought new effects. The choirs' antiphonal exchanges were striking, with the lines where entries in close imitation by the four doubling choirs moving round the auditorium sounding quite magical. The cumulative wonder of the Credo's final Amen alone felt like justification, were it needed, for Benevoli to be better acknowledged.
In both these masses, Hollingworth interpolated a different composer between the Gloria and the Credo. Greg Skidmore was the dramatically expressive soloist in Audio Coelum from Monteverdi's Vespers, the echoing voice at the back of the gallery giving the spatial dimension here. Infantas's Loquebantur Variis Linguis for eight voices was a startlingly intense experience, again underlining how refreshing and welcome I Fagiolini's advocacy of such less well-known repertoire is.
At the Stour festival, Kent, on 22 June
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