Programme

Performances

18 May 2022 @ 19.00
Pushkin House
5a Bloomsbury Square
WC1A 2TA

21 June 2022 @ 18.30
Royal Academy of Music
Marylebone Rd
NW1 5HT

24 June 2022 @ 18.30
Robinson College Chapel, Cambridge
Grange Rd
CB3 9AN

Background

On 4 June 1434, a handful of Benedictine monks rode their donkeys out of the Pope's palace in Rome down to the banks of the Tiber. A Florentine ship was waiting for them, which attracted attention because Rome was at war with Florence. A crowd gathered, and the monks barely made it aboard before one of them was recognised as Pope Eugene IV. He laid under a shield in the boat as Romans pelted the boat with rocks from the shore. They barely escaped to Florence, where the papacy remained for a decade.

In Florence, planning was well underway for the consecration of the Duomo that still dominates the skyline. Now with the resources of the Papacy to help, they commissioned a prominent young composer, also a member of the papal choir, to write something for the ceremony. His name was Guillaume Du Fay.

Meanwhile in Bruges, a wealthy Italian trader named Niccolo Arnolfini was getting married. To commemorate the occasion he commissioned a portrait of himself and his new wife from a painter who, like the composer in Rome, had recently worked his way into the employ of the upper classes.

Arnolfini was lucky to be in Bruges. Caught between the the warring Duchy of Milan (which fought with the Romans) and Florentine Republic, his native Lucca had been the victim of two brutal sieges in 1429 and 1430. He had the additional good fortune to move to a realm where a young and determined Jan Van Eyck was on hand to paint his portrait, one of the first that we know of to be rendered in oil paints.

Van Eyck’s painting and Du Fay’s music for the opening of the Florentine Duomo both show a preoccupation with translating physical space into a different medium. Du Fay composed the physical proportions of the church into the music; Van Eyck used the most current technology available to him to project three dimensional space onto a two-dimensional canvas. The ability to represent objects and spaces faithfully allows those that commission the paintings to project ownership of their possessions. The more exquisitely an object appears in the painting, the more direct the claim of ownership.

And where oil painting claims the physical realm, the ephemeral music of the church claims its connection to the otherworldly temporalities and ratios of the music of the cosmos, working on a scale far beyond human audition.

Both painting and music making are attempts to understand and control space, and so it is with this concert.

Through this music making we hope to come to terms with our new relationship with enclosure that we’ve developed in the past two years.