Chris Swithinbank

I have been lis­ten­ing a lot to this motet, Adesto do­lori meo, Deus, by the late-Re­nais­sance Flem­ish com­poser Alexan­der Uten­dal re­cently. The ris­ing chro­matic line that forms the basis for the open­ing im­i­ta­tive en­tries is mind-blow­ing in its de­ploy­ment, dis­play­ing fresh­ness and in­ge­nu­ity de­spite being nearly 500 years old. By the time the so­prano reaches her top D and the har­mony reaches its widest point, I am al­ways struck by the feel­ing of some­thing hav­ing grad­u­ally come to­wards me, emerg­ing from a mist. Uten­dal seems to be a rel­a­tively un­known fig­ure, but there are a few in­ter­net re­sources, in­clud­ing: videos on YouTube of Oltremon­tano and the Capilla Fla­menca per­form­ing some of his works; some peo­ple have help­fully re­pro­duced Hell­mut Feder­hofer’s Grove Dic­tio­nary of Music ar­ti­cle here and here (Flem­ish mu­si­col­o­gist Ignace Bossuyt dis­agrees with Grove’s date of birth, sug­gest­ing c. 1543-5 as cor­rect); and if you search the old Google you’ll pull up the odd other thing, in­clud­ing a few things in Dutch.

This record­ing is of my fa­ther’s group The Art of Music, a group of (usu­ally) six singers liv­ing and work­ing in Lux­em­bourg who have now been going for over fif­teen years with vary­ing per­son­nel and who spe­cialise in the per­for­mance of music from the Re­nais­sance and Mid­dle Ages.

Alexan­der Uten­dal Adesto do­lori meo, Deus
The Art of Music (Flash Com­pact Edi­tioun FCE 209/504)

Robert Guy’s final recital as an un­der­grad­u­ate at the Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter took place at 14:00 on Thurs­day 28 May in the Mar­tin Har­ris Cen­tre for Music and Drama, re­peat­ing the pro­gramme he gave in Wrex­ham two weeks pre­vi­ously: Max Bruch’s Ro­manze, Op. 85, and Paul Hin­demith’s Viola Sonata in F, Op. 11 No. 4, ac­com­pa­nied by Har­vey Davies, sand­wich­ing the sec­ond per­for­mance of my new piece for solo viola, Gaza Can­tos.

Friend and fre­quent mu­si­cal col­lab­o­ra­tor Robert Guy gave a viola recital as part of the Wrex­ham Arts Fes­ti­val on Sat­ur­day 9th May, 2009. The pro­gramme in­cluded Hin­demith, Bruch and a new work, Gaza Can­tos, that I wrote for him.

My piece for nine strings, Ex­ca­va­tions, draw­ing in­spi­ra­tion from 350 year-old Henry Pur­cell’s fan­tazias that was work­shopped by the Man­ches­ter Cam­er­ata in Oc­to­ber of last year and has since been heav­ily re­vised, was given a bril­liant first per­for­mance at Va­ganza New Music Day Deserts and Canyons: John Mc­Cabe at 70 under the baton of Robert Guy. Click here to lis­ten to a record­ing from that con­cert.

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