Preview

Theatre of Voices at Cleveland Museum of Art:

A conversation with artistic director Paul Hillier

By Daniel Hathaway

British-born conductor Paul Hillier will make his second visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art's Viva! & Gala series this season when he brings his Theatre of Voices to Gartner Auditorium on Wednesday, February 1. Last October, he appeared on the series with another of his groups, The National Chamber Choir of Ireland, and audiences will remember when he brought Ars Nova Copenhagen to Trinity Cathedral a few years back. Hillier first came to prominence with his groundbreaking group, The Hilliard Ensemble. He has headed the early music programs at the University of California at Davis and the University of Indiana, and now maintains a choral conducting career equally devoted to early music and contemporary music — and everything in between. We spoke with him via Skype in Porto, Portugal, where he was conducting Fauré and Mozart with the Coro Casa di Musica.

Daniel Hathaway: I see that for your Cleveland concert you've programmed music by Arvo Pärt along with works by Machaut, Dowland and 14^th century music from the Faenza Codex. How do these pieces work together on a program?

Paul Hillier: I think they work well together. Pärt himself is very keen on Machaut, and though you wouldn't necessarily guess that in terms of direct musical influence, his sympathy with that style is good to know about. When you do a program of Pärt's music, I think you have two choices. Either you do the whole thing as Pärt in that one general, rather contemplative mood, which can be very beautiful, or you look at it in a different way and you try to find connections but also contrasts. And really that's what I'm trying to do here. There are stylistic connections but also a great deal of contrast, and I think that makes for an interesting concert experience, especially in a venue that's not a church. And most often we're not. Therefore I take a great interest in this rather more mixed approach.

DH: Tell me about Pärt's “My heart is in the highlands”.

PH: That's a setting of a poem by Byron that I believe was part of the syllabus when Pärt was studying English as a boy. When he decided to write a song in English, he went back to that poem. It's in his characteristic style, but maybe a bit more active than some.

DH: Are the Pärt works from different points in his career?

PH: They're right across the spectrum. “Trivium”, an organ piece, is one of the earliest in his tintinnabuli style — very pure. The “Berlin Mass” is from the late 80s when he began to branch out and find out what he could do with it. “Da Pacem” is maybe ten years old and returns to the pure tintinnabuli style. “My Heart is in the highlands” is one of a handful of songs with non-sacred texts, each a curiosity in its own right. It was written for David James and the Hilliard Ensemble. “Veni creator” is quite recent, though technically in the same mold — a miniature and a good concert opener which gave me the excuse to program the Machaut, which is also related to “Veni sancte spiritus”, part of the “Berlin Mass”. That sets up connections across the program — not that one piece illustrates the other, but they enjoy cross connections with music and text. The same thing is true with the modern Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen Holmgreen's “Song”, which uses Dowland's “Lachrimae”. We sing the Dowland in the first half, then he deconstructs it in the second, eventually ending up in solid notes and a version of Dowland's song in the major. That sounds horrendous, but the result is actually very beautiful. “Walking Song” is a spirited organ solo that fits in because it contrasts with everything else yet makes perfect sense.

DH: And your organist will be Christopher Bowers-Broadbent?

PH: Chris and I have been doing Pärt together for about twenty years, and Pärt has written several organ pieces for him. He specializes in contemporary music and has a great gift for it. I don't just mean that he's able to play the right notes at the right time, but that he's really able to make music out of it, and frankly that's a rarity in terms of contemporary music.

DH: Where do your Theatre of Voices singers hail from?

PH: You know I moved back from the States to Europe in 2002 when I married a Danish woman. We now live in Denmark, so most of my activities are now in that part of Europe — Scandinavia and England. This particular group of five has one Swedish, two Danish and one English singer, an English organist and myself. I count as English, but I feel I'm kind of international I've been in so many places.

DH: Speaking of places you've been, I noticed that one of the places you've lived was in Leonard and Virginia Woolf's house. Were there ghosts of the Bloomsbury Group in residence?

PH: No ghosts, but I loved living in the Woolf's house in Sussex, which is not far from Glyndbourne in a little village among big hills but in an intimate atmosphere. It was fascinating to be in a place with those associations. There was also a lovely garden started by Leonard Woolf which had become overgrown but was cleaned up and developed by the Trust.

DH: Anywhere near the famous garden at Sissinghurst?

PH: No, that was Virginia Sackville-West's place in Kent, a long way away in English terms — twenty-five miles!

DH: You are something of a rarity — an English conductor who didn't come up through the cathedral/university choir system, and one who has wide-ranging tastes that include early music, contemporary music and popular music (you were an early member of Elvis Presley's fan club). What first got you hooked on music?

PH: When I was a teenager in Dorset, I didn't know there were no-go areas — I just loved music. From the age of 16 I started taking music more seriously and started listening particularly to Tudor music by Tallis and Byrd. I got to hear some fine performances by a group that didn't have a name but who later became The King's Singers. They sang the Tallis “Lamentations” and I was blown away by it. I went up to London to study music aiming to be a kind of leader-concert singer and somehow it just went on like that until I found I wanted to conduct it. I didn't realize that I was supposed to find contemporary music difficult. At the same time that I discovered Tudor music I enjoyed listening to Schoenberg and Stockhausen and I enjoyed the idea of what they were trying to do, even though it was very challenging to listen to. And that was almost simultaneously with hearing Beethoven and Verdi for the first time.

Click here to comment on this article. All comments will be moderated by the editorial staff.

Published on ClevelandClassical.com January 24, 2012

Click here for a printable version of this article.