Summerwinds Festival: Max Volbers, Seicento vocale, Jan Croonenbroeck & Alexander Toepper: Vogel.Stimmen.Fest
The chirping, tweeting, trilling, and twinkling! With a fabulous recorder player and singers performing up to 18 parts. In festive spirits, the internationally touring recorder virtuoso Max Volbers and Seicento vocale, the exquisite Westphalian vocal ensemble for Early Music, celebrate a cheerful “Vogel.Stimmen.Fest” – with a rarely experienced mix of music, filled with humor, seriousness, and depth.
Madrigals and motets, which originated 500 years ago, at the threshold of the Renaissance and Early Baroque, conclude with Moritz Eggert's “Nacht.Tick.All.” (2014) briefly: a polyphonic bird choir with blackbirds and owls, cuckoos or nightingales, that Max Volbers astonishingly expands, entwines, embraces, spurs on, or ironically subverts and surpasses with various recorders. In all his works, Eggert focuses “on the celebration of human imagination in the context of our wonder at the world.”
In the old songs, bird voices chirp from everywhere like on a late summer evening. Echo effects transport listeners to the caves of Greek nymphs, while angels sing to each other like in Venice's St. Mark's Basilica, from several choirs positioned throughout the church space.
The ancient symbol of the nightingale, representing love and lament, spring renewal, mystery and night, poetic inspiration and transcendence, is joyfully and ironically celebrated and shattered by Moritz Eggert with “Nacht.Tick.All.” His imaginative sound theater opens with a calm night music, until the recorder joins in “cheeky like a bird” (Eggert) and the festive bird celebration begins. Then, everyone loses control. Max Volbers must move his elbows abruptly to his playing, akin to wing flaps, rhythmically stamping with his foot. The choir sings “Nightingale” in 20 languages simultaneously and chaotically, until they take off “with a feeling of great expanse” (Eggert) and their song fades into the cosmos like celestial music. The chirping leads to Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples of Christ and inspires them to speak in foreign languages: “Oh, what a blessed feast.”
Vogel.Stimmen.Fest:
Moritz Eggert (*1965): Nacht.Tick.All. 3 word scenes for 8-part mixed choir and recorder
Works by Luca Marenzio (ca. 1553–1599), Orlando di Lasso (1532–1594), Clément Janequin (1485–1558), Melchior Vulpius (1570–1615), Johannes Eccard (1553–1611), Leo Hassler (1564–1612), Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594), Jacobus Clemens non Papa (ca. 1512–1555)
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
