Friday Night at the Proms: Monteverdi Choir Birthday Prom - Beethoven BBC Proms

Tonight, the stage is set

for Beethoven's late, great choral masterpiece,

the Missa Solemnis.

It was written at the same time as the Ninth Symphony,

and in some ways its scale and ambition are greater even than that.

The singers tackling this epic work

will be in these seats in about 15 minutes -

the Monteverdi Choir.

Over the past 50 years,

they have redefined the English choral tradition,

creating something new, radical, and viscerally exciting.

The Monties, as they are known, were founded by the legendary

British conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner,

and he has given us exclusive access

to the rehearsal process for this concert, telling the story

of what has made this choir unique across 50 years of innovation

as they embark on this new chapter in their history -

Beethoven at the BBC Proms.

You know, there's certain really iconic works that

you feel you're never done with,

that you always need to revisit on a periodic basis,

just to refresh your memory

of the experience of struggling with the material so much, and I would say

that the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven is one of those pieces.

Shall we get singing?

'You have to be alert and your radar has to be switched on

'and your antennae have to be out on stalks in order for it to work.'

# Kyrie eleison... #

'Traditionally, the Missa Solemnis is performed with a massive chorus

'and a big symphony orchestra and four rather operatic soloists.

'My own way through is'

to try and reconstruct, as far as possible, the colours

and textures that Beethoven himself would have had in his inner ear.

Still too fluttery, it hasn't got enough core to it.

Absolutely straight in, yeah?

Two, one!

# Kyrie... #

'The vocal writing, when it's done with a huge chorus, can be imposing'

and the emphasis on grandeur,

but probably at the expense of the agility and the definition

that you can get with a really small, hand-picked choir.

50 years ago,

Cambridge history undergraduate John Eliot Gardiner determined

to mount a rare performance of a challenging and obscure choral work,

Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610.

# Domine, ad adjuvandum... #

The aspiring young conductor had to take on the choral traditions

and styles of the day.

I couldn't get my head around the way

everything sounded so much the same,

didn't matter whether they were singing Palestrina or Stanford

or Benjamin Britten, it was all the same, and then

there were many other challenges - first of all, how to recruit a choir

and from mostly Cambridge undergraduates who were

frightfully well brought up

and educated in a particularly euphonious style, these coruscales.

I mean, this is a piece that I heard on the radio years before

and I knew to be probably the most significant slice of church music

that came out of Italy at the beginning of the 17th century,

and it was still pretty well unknown then in the early '60s.

He knew exactly the style and substance of the performance

he was going to give, and his determination we should not sound

like an English choir trying to sing Italian baroque music.

He wanted us to be right there in the middle of it,

being as Italian as we could.

# Lauda

# Lauda

# Lauda Jerusalem, Dominum... #

To have somebody challenge you time and again over one particular piece

in an extremely demanding and uncompromising way,

was, in fact, most exciting.

He was tireless in getting us to rehearse

and saying, "No, no, no, I want you to do it this way. Make that bigger,

"exaggerate that, make it bright,

"don't sing 'Gloria', sing 'Glaw-ria'", you know,

trying to Italianise a complete generation of English

-Anglican choral scholars.

-And it worked.

-Yeah.

It worked fantastically well.

I don't think any of us who were there at the beginning

will ever forget the impact of that extraordinary occasion.

I mean, however imperfect that first performance of the Vespers was

on 5th March, 1964, it really was like a Bunsen burner.

It lit a flame and there was no turning back for me after that,

and I was so fortunate that the Monteverdi Choir, which had grown

out of that first performance, was my laboratory, really.

Throughout the '70s and '80s,

the Monteverdi Choir established itself as a pioneering force.

Core to its identity was the forensic reappraisal

of lesser-known works of Renaissance and Baroque masters such as Schutz,

Rameau and Handel.

That sort of choral singing was ground-breaking then,

and, and, the repertoire

that they were presented with as it was performed

was something that we hadn't, we hadn't, as singers,

been involved in, and neither had the public.

It's that liveliness that other people didn't have.

I mean, English music was ploddy and slow

and all of a sudden it made sense.

-And it's so vitally alive, always.

-Absolutely.

We were doing something that really was new at the time.

We were creating the equivalent of a kind of team of athletes,

vocal athletes.

John Eliot, I think, possibly might have pioneered having male altos,

countertenors, and female altos on the same alto line.

You have that nice, wonderful quality of the female alto,

and then a little bit more grit in the middle of the male countertenor.

How should you describe it?

Absolutely, yes, I think gritty, really.

And it actually worked really well,

it was an interesting sound and it seemed to work.

There was a sense that we were not only doing repertoire that

very few other groups were doing,

but doing it in a way that made people really sit up.

In 1989, the singers took the Vespers to the Basilica of St Mark's

in Venice, where Monteverdi had been maestro di cappella.

A hallmark of the Monteverdi Choir is matching music with architecture,

out of the comfort of the concert hall,

into spaces that let the music resonate anew.

He hears space resonate

and he hears music create space.

When you get music and churches, music and architecture together,

something extraordinary can happen. It doesn't always happen.

You get to a building that is revered as a heritage site

and yet it feels flat inside,

it feels kind of as though its batteries have collapsed.

Bring music that's appropriate to that building

and extraordinary things happen.

By exploiting the architecture of St Mark's,

its many cupolas and galleries,

John Eliot Gardiner brought Monteverdi's theatrical score to life.

We had to record all night

because outside in the Piazza, there are two bands.

Florian's and Quadri's are the cafes and they play until about 1am.

They play waltzes and things.

And so we had to wait for them to finish,

so our recordings were done between 1am and 6am

and to have that music in an empty St Mark's,

being able to walk around the top galleries

and being able to be spaced out

among all the little domes and mosaics,

and then to walk out into St Mark's Square as the sun was coming up

with not a soul in the square

was pretty special.

The journey hasn't always been easy.

Behind every performance have been hours of painstaking preparation

and a lot of hard graft.

It's going two or three steps beyond what you thought you could do.

He demanded everything, and everything you'd got.

You didn't coast in the Monteverdi Choir.

Those of them that find it too hot, the intensity,

they have to get out of the kitchen,

and some do, but those that stay are the ones who...

who give so much, they're so generous, generous-spirited, and...

That's unbelievably touching and hugely rewarding.

It means that one is constantly planning for the future.

MUSIC: "Dixit Dominus" by Handel

THEY SING STACCATO

The rehearsal periods are so intense.

He's never about dots and notes.

I think John Eliot is looking for,

"What's the truth of this music?" And you know it when you find it.

'It's like peeling an onion, how one skin comes after another

'and you get closer'

and closer to what you feel to be

the essence of the experience and of the music.

That's good. The danger is that those staccatos can sound like laughter

and the whole thing can sound like

a ghoulish kind of mockery of what's going on, and actually,

it's, "He shall hit..." It's very, very strong.

It's extremely strong.

All his enemies are going to be trampled into the earth.

Yeah? Two, three, one.

# Con-quas-sa... #

No. Keep it really staccato, really, so every one is a hammer blow.

And...

-# Con-quas-sa

-Con-quas-sa

# Con-quas-sa

-# Con-quas-sa

-Con-quas-sa... #

-It's never, "Oh, well, you've done it now, it's done."

-No.

"See you at the gig." It can always be better.

There's always something that can be improved.

Pretty, but it doesn't have any emotion.

It's just, it's just candyfloss.

THEY SING GENTLY

That's better. It could still be more sensual, couldn't it?

You remember the wonderful Rubens Adoration of the Magi,

the very precocious, large-buttocked Lady Madonna,

but you know, she is the mother figure in contrast to

this emaciated, shrivelled-up,

gnarled corpse of a body that's hanging on the tree,

and there she is, grieving, all of her grieving, big-bodied grieving.

Let's hear it.

Go.

He's giving us images, so we're thinking of

all kinds of ideas that have resonances with other kinds of media

like touch or colour.

-And everyone moves with it.

-It's like Total Football.

You know, it's 11 players, but every player is almost thinking with

the same mind as every other player.

'I don't think I was ever interested just to paddle light,'

to replicate the same repertoire.

I was always looking for new challenges for myself,

but also new challenges for the musicians I was working with,

because I reckon that's how to engage their loyalty

and their interest, and also their development.

The year 2000 saw the choir take on its biggest challenge to date -

performances spread over a single year

of all 198 of Bach's church cantatas,

some of his most dramatic choral music.

My starting point with the choir during that cantata year was to get

them to be as utterly familiar with the words as they possibly could be.

Text, text, text.

That's what we have as singers that is different from instrumentalists.

We have text, and we have the ability to express that

through song and music, and that's really quite incredible.

The words are the fuel that makes the motor hum.

Sometimes Bach colludes with the text,

Lutheran words, pious words.

At other times, he goes his own way,

he goes at an oblique angle towards the text.

Infusing text with drama

is a crucial aspect of the choir's approach

and their versatility has opened unexpected doors.

I was always interested, right from the word go,

with the Monteverdi Choir, to get them out of their concert gear

and onto the opera platform, because I reckon it would free them up

and it would make them far less inhibited

and also it would bring something quite different.

I was singing in the chorus in Carmen, and one of the things

I most enjoyed, actually, was putting on the gypsy outfits!

And swanning around in swishy skirts.

Liberation and a sense of movement

is a very good counterbalance to the sort of cerebral approach.

So it's not just a musical experience,

it's also very much a theatrical one the whole time,

but that in turn feeds into what you do musically,

so you've got a springboard the whole time, a natural springboard.

The drama of opera is in everything we do.

It is absolutely taken back to the bare bones, primary colours.

It's just got to be high quality, high calibre all the time,

but if it lacks personality, then it's not the Monteverdi Choir.

The most essential kind of repertoire for the choir

is unaccompanied choral music,

polyphony by any other name.

It's when the choir is at its most exposed, at its most vulnerable.

Performing music in the country or landscape in which it was composed

is yet another aspect of the choir's aesthetic,

and 2004 saw John Eliot Gardiner and his singers pack their hiking boots

to tread one of the oldest, most famous of the pilgrimage routes,

the road to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.

We were doing music of what they call

the Siglo d'Oro, their Golden Age,

the age of Victoria, Morales, Guerrero, Alonso di Lobo.

We walked some of the way.

We went the rest of it in buses, and we did 17 concerts in three weeks.

That particular pilgrimage,

for me, was just a great moment in proving, after we had done operas

and various things, that suddenly there was this choir

that could be really honed down to being just choral,

no backing off, you were on display.

There is a built-in reticence

that this music doesn't need interpretation,

it just needs to unfold in beautiful euphony.

To me, that's utter bunkum.

There's much, much more.

There's more kind of seething stuff bubbling underneath

the surface of the music that can be brought out.

Drama, religious, fiery fervour, and melancholy, all these things.

You're talking about extremes - extremes of dynamics,

extremes of emotion, extremes of vowel colour.

Sometimes a kind of gasping or a sighing in the sound

or, you know, a sob, a weep.

I'm sitting next to one of the violinists in the orchestra

on a flight recently,

and she described the sound of the choir as being like a silver dagger,

and she said, "I don't hear that sound anywhere else."

You realise that all the things

that have made him one of our great conductors worldwide,

he knew then, as a 20-year-old, exactly where he was going.

He knew which route his journey was going to take,

and the great thing is, he took us all on it.

It may seem like just a banality,

but there is a tremendous sense of pride in that

of going through the trenches together

and coming out the other side,

they really are a battle-hardened team of musical athletes.

'And I find that hugely moving, actually.'

Syncopations, please, sopranos and altos, in bar 322.

# Dum-dee... #

Just nudge them a bit more. And...

For tonight's concert, the choir are, as ever, hard at work

to bring Beethoven's epic Missa Solemnis to life.

'Beethoven was in his 50s when he wrote the Missa Solemnis

'and in a way, it's a sort of omnium gatherum.

'It collects all the previous experiments that he had made.

'It suggests that his very uneasy relationship'

with the Catholic Church and its rituals

was something that he had to confront and, in a way, escape from

because in the end, it's a piece of concert music.

To me, there is a dangerous and very unstable side to Beethoven,

which is revealed in the Missa Solemnis.

It's incredibly urgent, coruscating stuff,

and every single time, there are new things to discover

and new ways of approaching it.

I mean, the summit is still the same, Everest is still there,

this is his Everest.

But there may be different paths going up to the same peak.

And the same sense of exhilaration when you get to the top.

Ultimately, it doesn't have answers, this piece, it has lots of questions.

What he's saying at the end is, "I've shown you the journey,

"I've shown you my personal journey, now it's over to you."

APPLAUSE

MUSIC ENDS

APPLAUSE

"From the heart - may it return to the heart!"

The words Beethoven wrote on the first page of his Missa Solemnis,

performed tonight at the BBC Proms by the Monteverdi Choir.

APPLAUSE CONTINUES

Rapturous applause from the audience here at the Royal Albert Hall

as Sir John Eliot Gardiner returns to the stage with his soloists,

the soprano, Lucy Crowe, mezzo soprano, Jennifer Johnston,

tenor, Michael Spyres, and bass, Matthew Rose.

The Monteverdi Choir taking their bow,

and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique.

Well, what a way to celebrate your 50th birthday.

The Monteverdi Choir partying in high style here at the BBC Proms.

Do stay tuned to BBC Four this evening, as later on tonight,

at 10.15pm, we'll be back live at the Royal Albert Hall

for a Late Night Prom with Paloma Faith and the Guy Barker Orchestra.

But for now, from all of us here, good night.