Ely rising out of the Fenland mist couldn’t have been a more magical setting for this concert. It was completely sold out – a thousand people or more – and the audience was enchanted by it. We decided on three of the new pieces I’d brought to try. One worked quite well, another less so, and one we left out by mistake. I also sang in a couple of old ‘Officium’ pieces that seemed to work just as they had fifteen years ago, and the guys did a mixture of old stuff and more recent material from Officium Novum (including a stunningly beautiful Mother of God, the only piece Arvo Pärt actually wrote for the four of them). And of course Jan Garbarek’s saxophone, funky, lyrical, discreet and brash in turns, rocked the very stones. We didn’t do Parce mihi (maybe in Cambridge…) – which someone once famously said is what Coltrane hears in heaven. That assumes heaven is somewhere in the misty north – the earthy reality of Jan’s playing is more a case of a very personal Nordic modality energised by the ghost of Coltrane’s boundless imagination.
I’d expected to feel sentimental – Penny and Ned were there, just as they’d been at the very first gig in Cambridge twenty years ago, and they were quite touched by the occasion – but it was somehow easy just to slip into business as usual and not think too hard. I did allow myself a nano-second of wondering what it would be like if I hadn’t left the group when I did – and decided that on balance everything was as it should be: the guys had honed an incredibly successful collaboration into something that has made a huge impact all over the world, and having helped to set it going I then had the whole York experience and the adventures of the Dowland Project and countless other schemes over the ensuing decade and a half. I’m looking forward to the grand finale in Cambridge, and I think it’ll feel right – a proper end to a project that everyone has loved. All in all, we’ve been incredibly fortunate.
Incidentally, the Song School where we assembled before the start was equipped with a dart board and bottles of water that are brought from France each month (as well as a cache of even more interesting lubricants). Cathedral vestries weren’t like that in my day.
3 Medieval Tenors
Rogers Covey-Crump, Christopher O’Gorman and I currently have around a dozen concerts pencilled for next year in the UK, Germany, Slovenia, Spain and Belgium as the Conductus research project enters its final phase. More details in a week or so. The third Conductus CD will be released by Hyperion in June.
