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Birmingham Early Music Festival 2002
Songs and Sagas
Birmingham Early Music Festival theme, Songs and Sagas, explored and rejoiced in the oral transmission of music. The Festival investigated the passing on from one generation to the next of national and local folklore through music. Concerts covered a diverse range of geographical and ethnic boundaries. These included:
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Participation by performers from ten different countries
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UK débuts by international performers from Tblisi and Sarajevo
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Presentation of vocal and instrumental music from Germany, the UK and Ireland, Croatia, Turkey, Macedonia, Greece, Romania, Bosnia Herzegovina, France, Asia, India and Georgia
The nucleus of the Festival consisted of six concerts in five different venues between 2 and 16 November 2002. Two of the venues – St Augustine’s Church, Edgbaston, and St Paul’s Church, St Paul’s Square – were new to the Festival. In addition, in an associated event held in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham, the local (but internationally known) Indian singer Sanchita Pal performed a selection of traditional Indian songs. Sanchita was accompanied by instrumentalists playing tabla and sarangi.
For the first time in its ten-year history, the Birmingham Early Music Festival promoted two events by children as part of its main series. In one of these performances the Birmingham Schools Asian Music Ensemble impressed an audience at the Barber Institute with their rhythmic dexterity and enthusiastic playing. In contrast, as the culmination of a two-week Education project, local children performed their own new compositions based on the traditions of Asian music and dance at an informal concert at their school in Handsworth.
The Festival opened at the Barber Institute on 2 November with the west European concert début of Bosnian singer and guitarist Teo Krilic, accompanied by fiddler Aidan Burke. Both of these artists had travelled from their homes in Sarajevo to perform a selection of traditional Sevdah songs which, in keeping with the Festival theme, had been handed down orally to Teo from his father and from him to Aidan. The Sevdah folk-singing tradition blends influences from Turkey, Macedonia, Greece, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. This excellent concert attracted an enthusiastic audience, amongst whom it was good to see a number of younger supporters from the University.
From Bosnian Sevdah traditions, the Festival moved closer to home on 6 November, with an enchanting evening of traditional Irish harp music by the ‘Irish Musician of the Year’ in 2001, Máire Ní Chathasaigh. One of the finest exponents of the Irish harp, Máire not only thrilled us with her manual dexterity and musicianship; she also went to great lengths to explain the historical context of each piece. The concert took place in the beautiful St Augustine’s Church.
The Festival’s lead event brought one of the world’s finest medieval ensembles to Birmingham for the first time. Sequentia, who are now based in Paris, presented a unique programme that brought to life 1,000-year-old songs of humour, love, greed and murder from across medieval Europe. The repertoire included the old Icelandic story of the Rhinegold curse, the bloody tale of revenge and seduction that inspired Wagner’s Ring cycle. This was an outstanding evening of intensely dramatic and highly expressive songs and sagas. It did not matter that the words were in various foreign languages, as Sequentia’s spell-binding presentation ensured that the audience remained captivated throughout. It was right that this performance was promoted as the Festival’s lead event. The concert was listed in The Independent together with a photograph of the group, and reviewed in The Birmingham Post.
Although Sequentia was a hard act to follow, the relatively new ensemble Alva, consisting of Vivien Ellis and Giles Lewin, gave a first-rate performance on 13 November, at the Barber Institute. Vivien not only showed off her beautiful voice, but occasionally turned her hand to the playing of percussion instruments to highlight specific musical themes or choruses. Often accompanied by Giles on fiddle, ’ud or voice, she focused on Sephardic and Yiddish folk songs in the first half of the programme, turning after the interval to songs from medieval France, Ireland and the British Isles. The audience thoroughly enjoyed the presentation, and only after they had sung an encore were the duo allowed to leave the stage.
The final concert in the 2002 Festival featured another ensemble appearing in Birmingham for the first time. This was Mzetamze, a group of six female vocalists from Tbilisi (Georgia) who performed at St Paul’s Church on 16 November with an enchanting programme of women’s songs and round dances from the Caucasus mountains, across Georgia to the Black Sea.
The Birmingham Early Music Festival continues to demonstrate a strong commitment toward education, and there were three projects this year involving pupils from over 15 schools from across the city. The first project took place on Wednesday 6 November in St Augustine’s Church, Edgbaston. Over 30 local children took part in an early music Choral Day with singers Vivien Ellis and Giles Lewin, the members of Alva (see concert on 13 November, above). The project was run in collaboration with the Birmingham Music Service. Local Asian artists Sarvar and Sonia Sabri held 12 workshops with students from King Edward’s Handsworth School, Priestly Smith and Wilson Stuart SEN schools and children from St Michael’s Junior School in a project based on Asian music and dance. The culmination of this project was an informal performance to both parents and the general public at King Edward’s Handsworth School on Wednesday 20 November.
As in previous years, the programming of the 2002 Birmingham Early Music Festival was both courageous and innovative. There is no doubt that oral traditions played an important part in music and music-making before the mid-eighteenth century. Through its theme of Songs and Sagas, the Festival not only re-emphasised the importance of the oral transmission of music but also extended its boundaries to reflect and rejoice in the multi-cultural diversity that is an important aspect of life in Birmingham. The Festival brought performers from far away lands into the heart of the city to entertain us with their nostalgic tales and of love, humour, ritual and intrigue, passed down through countless generations. This they achieved magnificently. Some might argue that the Festival strayed too far toward ‘world’ music; even these critics, however, must agree that oral traditions provide a direct link with the past and that the Festival’s presentation of such traditions offered listeners a unique opportunity to understand how legends were recounted in days gone by. By taking songs and sagas into schools and teaching them to today’s children, the Festival both continued a wonderful tradition and encouraged an acceptance of diverse national cultures and beliefs. In provoking healthy debate throughout the Early Music community, in the pages of The Early Music Network and News, the Birmingham Early Music Festival confirmed its position at the forefront of artistic exploration in the field.
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