San Francisco Classical Voice

Almost a millennium before the "Pastor Bobs" fastened on their cordless mikes to recite the "Let's Have Lunch" version of the liturgy accompanied by refrains from Peter, Paul, and Mary, a German visionary nun was composing ineffably sublime musical settings of her mystical poetry on the banks of the Rhine. Hildegard of Bingen, whose 900th birthday is commemorated this year, was channeled by the celebrated women's vocal quartet Anonymous 4, to a rapt audience in San Francisco's St. Ignatius Church on Friday in a program entitled "11,000 Virgins."

It featured a quasi-liturgy combining Hildegard's music for the Feast of St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins with contemporaneous liturgical chants for the monastic services of Vigil, Lauds, and Vespers. The seamless voices sent arabesques of disembodied tone into the dome above the high altar. Except for brief readings from the story of St. Ursula, declaimed with re-Raphaelite affectation by each of the singers, the evening consisted of purely distilled monophonic (single-line) chant, which on occasion blossomed into two-voice note-against-note organum, "in the archaic style."

The melodically adventurous Hildegard, whose buoyant "Symphony of Virgins" (Sinfonia virginum) entitled "O dulcissime amator" soars and dips through erotic imagery, celebrates the virgins who take the veil and Jesus as their spiritual bridegroom. Ornamental melismas decorate sensual lines such as "O sweetest scent of desired delights." Her powerful sequence "O Ecclesia" retells the legend of St. Ursula as an allegory of the universal church.

It is difficult to speak of this event in terms of a "concert" or "performance," as the performers were so selflessly given over to the music itself; their homogeneity of tone, dispassionately downcast eyes, and seemingly effortless vocal production gave the illusion of mediums rather than singers. Their tone itself is personless--straight and deliberately naive, with a somewhat reedy core--perhaps what the self-effacing Hildegard might have ordered.

Perhaps not. Fresh from seeing "A Lion in Winter" on television this week, I wonder if the boisterous and bawdy twelfth century--with jousts, trials by fire, and damsels in distress--ever experienced such abject musical modesty, even in its religious. Is this perhaps a Calvinist gloss on papist imagery? Did Hildegard write lines such as "Then the devil inspired his minions to put these noblest and best of women to death"--to be sung with the limpidity of four "Grecian urns?"

There is no denying the clarity and purity of this superb ensemble. When singing in two parts against a drone, they gave new import to the meaning of "perfect" intervals. The blossoming of polyphony in the sequence "O Ecclesia" was a climactic event. One sensed that the hundreds in the audience were breathing together with the singers' leisurely phrases--a kind of biorhythm that continued into the readings as well. The cacophony of coughing which followed each major work only highlighted the rapt attention of the audience during the singing; Davies Hall has never heard such a pregnant silence.

In the final analysis, whether they represent a "true" medieval sound or not (only Hildegard knows for sure, and she's dead), Anonymous 4 gives a captivating performance capable of transporting a world-weary Friday night audience to transcendent heights. The experience was both musical and spiritual, and a reminder of a time when mystical revelation, rather than rational relevance, was the order of the day.

()

©1998 Bruce Lamott, all rights reserved