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The arrangements to interview Wickham had been handled by ASV’s personable and enthusiastic press and promotion manager Johanna Knowles. It is she I first encounter at our arranged meeting place, the Café Rouge in Blackheath, one of the most attractive of London’s many “villages” and Wickham’s present home. Minutes later Wickham bundles in and we are introduced. He is alarmingly youthful looking, with a fresh, open countenance framing a shock of fairish hair, the sort one might expect to encounter at an Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate’s function. I congratulate him on the award, a distinction that obviously means a great deal to Wickham, who confesses that when he played the recording of the Requiem the day after the ceremony, he was reduced to tears. An easygoing conversation is immediately established, and preliminaries once settled, we move almost seamlessly into the interview.
Let’s move on now to those extraordinarily successful recordings of Ockeghem. What drew you personally in the first instance to a composer who has always had the reputation of being difficult?
Two pieces really, both of which I encountered when I was at university. The first was Intemerata Dei mater which is, at least until some scholar comes along and contradicts it, a work which has no cantus firmus base. Now one tends to sing a lot of early music which has these cantus firmus lines; this is a motet that is entirely freely composed, and it sounds like that, it sings like that. It’s almost like a jazz improvisation at times, and the way that the melisma at the end whirls around itself and comes to a conclusion is just so exciting, so singable, and there’s this free-spiritedness about it which is, I think, unique.
So it is as a singer rather than a listener that you originally came to this music?
Oh, indeed, yes. The other piece which I also encountered at university was a mass, the Missa Ecce ancilla Domini. It was actually a particular moment of this piece, the ending of the Gloria, where all the voices build from a very low pitch up to a most extraordinary rolling “Amen.” Just that one moment, which must last 30 seconds, captivated me and I was drawn in.
One of the things that interests me is the question of recording masses within the plainsong context. There’s been a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of doing so in the early music world. You’ve not done so in the Ockeghem series. Is this because of commercial considerations, or are there other reasons?
Well, there is a problem with the Ockeghem repertoire which is that to actually reconstruct a mass would be very difficult—I don’t think the scholarly world is capable of doing that for Ockeghem’s music in the same way as that wonderful reconstruction of the Taverner Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas which Andrew Parrott did. The contexts are very different; these are masses composed for a court circle for which the liturgy remains fairly obscure. We really don’t know very much about it, so to satisfactorily reconstruct a mass as it might have been heard in Ockeghem’s day would be rather more of a scholarly feat than I think is possible. There’s another issue here too, I think. It doesn’t seem to me that recording the music in its plainchant context really draws you in any more to what one might call an authentic experience. This music is in any case withdrawn from its context. The way people thought about their devotions in the 15th century is utterly different. The whole idea of recording a piece of music, even performing a piece of music—and take the word performance—would they have really understood what a performance was in the context of devotional music? So it seems to me there are so many issues which cut us off from the sensibilities of 15th-century singers and worshippers that just pushing in a bit of plainchant doesn’t cure anything in my view. Having said that, what is nice is that when the polyphony is particularly similar in, say, a parody mass, where you have the same music re-composed movement after movement, dividing it up with plainchant does seem to me a sensible thing to do, simply from a natural performance point of view. But in Ockeghem’s music I don’t think you have the same problems; there was no such thing as a parody mass at that time and those issues just don’t arise.
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