Finishing its season this Saturday at First Church Cambridge, Blue Heron brought us songs of love with vivid imagery of fruit, trees, and flowers that heralded the arrival of spring, despite the chilly weather. With a focus on 16th-century Spain, the group wove together secular Spanish love songs with Latin motets based on the Biblical Song of Songs (aka Canticle of Canticles or the Song of Solomon). Interspersed with these choral offerings, actors Ohad Ashkenazi and Bella Cadena portrayed the lovers in the Song of Songs, acting out in English translation the verses which served as the basis for the motets and songs that followed. At other times, cantor Louise Treitman chanted the verses in the original Hebrew and Cadena recited some contemporaneous Spanish poems, allowing us to savor the sounds of the original languages alongside the English.
While the evening included too many individual works to name here (the full program is HERE), the composers comprised a few familiar names with some lesser known ones, all Spanish or connected to Spain. Alongside perennial favorites like Tomás Luis de Victoria and Nicolas Gombert (a Flemish composer who spent time in Spain at the court of Charles V), Blue Heron delved deeper into the Spanish Renaissance to bring us motets by Francisco Guerrero (1528-1599) and Sebastián de Vivanco (c. 1550-1622) with villancicos by Juan Vásquez (c. 1500-c.1560) and a 1556 publication of anonymous songs. This wide-ranging program not only mixed the sacred with the secular—as does the Song of Songs itself—but also highlighted the beautiful sensuousness of Spanish Renaissance polyphony, a style often sidelined in traditional historiography in favor of the Franco-Flemish canon.
The central conceit of the concert was the ambiguity of the Song of Songs itself, a Hebrew poem that on its face ‘sings’ explicitly of the erotic charge of a youthful romance. Yet, the traditional allegorical interpretations of the text infusing it with religious meaning— due to the erroneous attribution of authorship to King Solomon —challenge our understanding of the sacred and the secular, the holy and the erotic, as manifestly separate. For instance, in Judaism, the lovers have been held to symbolize the love of God for Israel or, in the Christian interpretation, the love of Jesus Christ for the Church. Most clearly, Blue Heron demonstrated this ambiguity with Marian motets such as Tota pulchra es by Guerrero. With text adapted directly from the Song of Songs, Tota pulchra es (“You are all beautiful”) is addressed directly to the Virgin Mary. Guerrero’s sensuous polyphony with its intimately intertwined vocal lines evokes striking images of Mary’s physical beauty, drawing on the Song of Songs. Blue Heron wielded their characteristic mixture of technical prowess and sensitive expression to make these text and musical connections vividly apparent. Later in the evening, they returned to a similar text in a motet of the same title by Gombert which however does not reference Mary directly, showing clearly the slippery nature of the sacred and secular in these works that drew on the Song. Highlighting both the ambiguity of meaning and the uniquely sensuous vocal writing of the 16th-century Spanish style, Blue Heron proved that Renaissance vocal polyphony carries more than just intellectual and spiritual meaning and can provide a more direct sense of aural pleasure that verges on the erotic.
Alongside these sacred motets, Vásquez’s villancicos—exemplifying a popular Spanish genre of secular polyphony—strongly foregrounded the sensuous sounds of Spanish polyphony in a more explicitly romantic context. Similarly to other secular genres such as the madrigal, the villancico features imitation among the voices and grouping of subsets of the choir. For instance, in Vásquez’s Ojos morenos, ¿quando nos veremos? the vocalists used their impeccable diction and laser-accurate intonation to evoke the poem’s earnest question, “Oh brown eyes, when will we see each other again?” To further heighten the intensity of the emotion, the singers visually demonstrated the imitation and smaller groupings within the dense polyphony through bodily gestures and frequent eye contact. Their use of physical gesture in performance once again accentuated the sensuous and even erotic nature of the music.
Beyond these purely musical considerations, the incorporation of acting added a dramatic sense of narrative to portions of the evening. Following intermission, the performers returned to a darkened sanctuary, with only light from the altar at the back of the chancel and the singers’ backlit tablets. We sat in near complete darkness as Cadena portrayed the young woman in the Song of Songs lying in her bed at night, longing for her lover, and rising to go search for him in the streets. Through both her speech and physical movements, she brought this part of the poem to life. Blue Heron followed this excerpt from the Song with two anonymous villancicos. First, Ay luna que reluzes addresses the “shining moon,” while Si la noche haze escura tells of a woman waiting longingly in the dark of night for her lover. After Cadena’s recitation of a Spanish poem by Francisco de la Torre, this darkened portion of the performance finished with a motet by Victoria, Vadam et circuibo civitatem, based on the same portion of the Song that Cadena had acted out earlier. In this combination of acting, lighting, poetry, and music, Blue Heron crafted a very theatrical presentation of the intensity of young love in the Song of Songs.
In this revival of a program last performed in 2012, Blue Heron once again combined its trademark technical precision with evocative storytelling based on careful historical research. In doing so, they highlighted a lesser-known area of Renaissance vocal polyphony, showing the continued efficacy of HIP to expand the colorful palette of early music performance.