Back in 2006, the still-fledgling vocal consort EXAUDI devoted their second CD to the music of Christopher Fox. A Glimpse of Sion's Glory was released on NMC in 2006, and the relationship between composer and singers has proved exceedingly fruitful ever since. Numerous dedications and first performances have followed that first album, as well as, in 2009, a second, Catalogue irraisoné, released on Métier. In the meantime, Fox's music has become increasingly honoured: the portrait discs have multiplied, his name is mentioned frequently among younger composers as an influence, and in 2017 a book of essays dedicated to his music (and edited by Rose Dodd) was published by Ashgate. For their part, EXAUDI have gone from strength to strength to become not only one of the country's leading vocal groups, but also one of its leading new-music ensembles, full stop.
So it is fitting to have here, at the start of EXAUDI's third decade, a third Fox album. In comparison with the crisp austerity of Catalogue irraisoné (a collection of objets trouvé balanced on the edge between music and concrete poetry) and the miniaturist compendium of A Glimpse of Sion's Glory, Trostlieder is positively sumptuous; with its numerous allusions to the music of the English, German and Italian Baroques, it represents a side of Fox's vocal music that has hitherto been under-represented on record.
This sound is thanks in large part to that ongoing relationship with EXAUDI. James Weeks’ group is renowned for its equal sensitivity to early and contemporary music, and for the many ways in which it has productively braided the two together. Trostlieder is dominated by works written for EXAUDI: as well as the title composition (2015) the group is also dedicatee and first performer of the three madrigals, Canti del carcere (2013–18), written for EXAUDI's Italian Madrigal Project, and of Preluding (2006), composed shortly after that first recording and co-dedicated to the memory of Michael Tippett.
The Trostlieder in Widerwertigkeit des Kriegs (to give the work its full title) were composed as companion pieces to selections from Heinrich Schütz's late, severe Geistliche Chormusik for an EXAUDI concert at the Wigmore Hall in December 2015. Noting that Schütz had lived most of his maturity under the shadow of the Thirty Years’ War, Fox turned to the Trostgedichte in Widerwertigkeit des Kriegs (Poems of Comfort in the Awfulness of War) by Martin Opitz, vivid descriptions of the economic and social devastation of the war. (There was a personal connection, too, in Fox's own family's origins in Pomerania, where much of the war was fought; and no European will miss the ongoing relevance of Opitz's harrowing images.) Often starkly declamatory, Fox's settings recall the gradual turn to austerity and simplification of Schütz's music that accompanied the devastation of war. Yet they are also possessed of expressive nuance: the second song is chill and tender in its description of the inevitable turning of the seasons (‘The field is rich with blessings throughout the year / and by turn hidden beneath cold, frost and rain’); the third is a kind of psalm with refrain, with each verse given to a different solo voice (the punchy precision of the writing here does recall A Glimpse of Sion's Glory); the fourth switches gears with each stanza across a range from hocketing polyphony to homophonic chant.
By comparison, the Canti del carcere are richly ornamented, befitting their Italian inspiration. Nevertheless, in setting commentaries on Dante in Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (as well as words by Dante himself), they are no less serious in their subject matter. The texts are not set strictly, however: in the first (‘fantasma’), it is shattered into fragments; in the second (‘senso comune’), the consonants are all omitted, leaving only a vowel-shadow of Gramsci's words; and in the third (‘suo tormento’), the text is read outwards from the centre, reflecting its discussion of the torments of foresight and hindsight. The character of the music in each instance emerges from these constraints: a lyrical, aphoristic gesturality; a strangely chiming atmosphere of sung timbres; and a quasi-serialist pointillism. The shorter Preluding also takes a sidelong approach to its text, somehow cramming all 150 lines of Wordsworth's Was it for this into just nine minutes of music. Appropriately, the score indicates that this music should be sung ‘like a gale’; EXAUDI's commitment to Fox's music in the teeth of this formidable challenge is abundantly clear.
A fourth work, A Spousal Verse (2004) – distinctly English-tinged in its abundant false relations – was written for another group of early music specialists, The Clerks. The Clerks recorded this on their 2009 Signum Classics album Don't Talk, Just Listen (a title taken from Fox's 20 Ways to Improve Your Life). In comparison to their slower, more languorous version, with its solo line sunk deeply into the choral refrains, EXAUDI's performance is mellifluous and onrushing, a breathless anticipation of marriage, rather than a last night's solitary rest.
The comparison is useful: all of EXAUDI's performances here resist indulgence, preferring instead presentations as though through a crystal-clear glass. It is an approach that suits Fox's music, which at times positions itself in relation to its materials somewhere between Verfremdungseffekt and genuine affection. (The album closes with the short Song (24.iv.1916) of 2016, a commemoration of the Easter Uprising whose melodies are generated from the singers’ names by way of a musical cipher.) Ironically, such clarity does not always make music straightforward to read: like a Heston Blumenthal concoction, it is somehow both cool and warm at once, both ironically detached and playfully open. It's not a bad trick, though; and in a world plagued by extremes of earnestness and deceit, it is refreshingly welcome.
