I Fagiolini, Voces8 Festival, review: 'A different class of online music-making'

If your impression of online music-making during the lockdown has been of something a tad homespun, be prepared to be blown away by Voces8 online choral festival Live from London. This 10-concert series showcasing the best choral ensembles in the country, plus one from the US is as slickly produced as they come – as you might expect, given that it’s the brainchild of Voces8, the group whose perfect intonation is rivalled only by their perfect tailoring and amazing entrepreneurial pizzazz.

Saturday’s concert, the second in the series, was given over entirely to Claudio Monteverdi, and came from that wonderful group I Fagiolini, whose director, Robert Hollingworth, has done more to make Monteverdi’s music accessible to British audiences than anyone else alive.

We heard a number of impassioned love songs for five singers known as madrigals, alongside later pieces where two or three voices are accompanied by the delicious sounds of the long-necked bass lute and a chamber organ. Mixed in with these anguished expressions of despair at the lover’s coldness were some lighter things. One was Duo Seraphim, the virtuoso call-and-echo number for two tenors from Monteverdi’s Vespers, sung with the right rhetorical flourish by Nicholas Mulroy and Matthew Long. There was a nicely teasing duet, charmingly portrayed by Hollingworth and Clare Wilkinson.

But the predominant tone was pleading or despairing, expressed by Monteverdi in masochistically intense harmonies which these singers nailed perfectly. The highlight was the early madrigal Rimanti in Pace, where the descent from anguish to dignified sorrow was perfectly judged. Only one thing troubled me, and that was the imbalance in intensity between the men and the women.

It felt as if the women were confined to pure-voiced, gentle pathos. Rebecca Lea was movingly pathetic as the abandoned nymph in Lamento della Ninfa, and she and Clare Wilkinson were decorously plaintive in Ohimè il bel viso. But when it came to the erotic edge in Monteverdi’s music, we had to rely on the men – a bit of sexual stereotyping which was odd to encounter in 2020. That caveat aside, it was a delightful hour’s music-making.

Voces8 Foundation’s online festival of vocal music Live from London continues every Saturday until Oct 3. Details and tickets from voces8.foundation/livefromlondon