Collegium Vocale Gent and Saint Barbara

©Michel Garnier

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

This quotation by the British novelist Aldous Huxley was placed on the first page of the programme accompanying a concert of Renaissance vocal music that I heard this week. More apt words would be hard to find.

It was the first time I had heard Philippe Herreweghe’s Collegium Vocale Gent, not least because whenever I’ve tried in the past to hear the ensemble they have either been touring or their concerts sold out. This week’s setting was the Eglise des Minimes in Brussels, the theme ‘Musica per Santa Barbara,’ the music a sheer joy to listen to.

Saint Barbara was the patron saint of Mantua, and in the 16^th century the Italian city’s duke had a basilica built in her honour. The Basilica di Santa Barbara attracted many composers including the Italian Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and the Fleming Giaches de Wert. It was their compositions along with those of Claudio Monteverdi (a pupil of Wert) that made up the evening’s one-hour programme of 16^th and 17^th century motets and mass excerpts.

The voices of the 14 unaccompanied singers, directed by Herreweghe himself, filled the church, no matter whether it was a quiet, mournful sound to accompany words of sorrow and misery or a rich, powerful tone as the joys of life were celebrated. The singing was pure, precise and simply beautiful.

My favourite piece was probably Wert’s motet “Vox in Rama audita est” (A voice was heard in Ramah), which opened with a wonderful bass voice that made my stomach feel tight such was the intensity, the tension building up further as the tenors, altos and sopranos joined in one by one. At times, the notes were so close together that the pain and anguish being sung about were almost palpable.

This was music that did indeed come very close to expressing the inexpressible.

The same programme will be sung in their Belgium home town of Ghent on Feb. 11 and then in Rouen, France on Feb. 12. A full calendar is available here.

Chinese culture: all fired up

  ©Palace Museum

I don’t know why I waited until the last possible week to see the exhibition 'Son of Heaven,' part of the Europalia China extravaganza that has been happening in Brussels during the last few months, but I did. Then again, I did go and see it twice that week!

My delayed visit may have had something to do with the fact that there were so many cultural offerings during the Europalia China festival that there was almost too much choice. And of course that time-old trap of saying to myself: ‘Oh it’s on for months, I’ll have plenty of time to see it’.

An added impetus to see it in January though was that I had just come back from a two-week orchestral tour to China, my first trip to the country, and was all fired up about everything to do with Chinese culture.

“Son of Heaven,” whose title refers to China’s rulers, didn’t disappoint. The exhibits included portraits of emperors on silk wall hangings, bronze ritual vessels, a jade shroud, and silk dragon robes once worn by the rulers. There were even a couple of terracotta warriors – admittedly not quite as impressive as the (almost) complete terracotta army I had seen in their Chinese home of Xi’an just a few weeks earlier, but you could view the ones in Brussels much closer up and could more easily see traces of their original colours.

The Brussels exhibition covered 5,000 years of Chinese culture and so was just a taster of the country’s imperial wealth during that time. Nonetheless the exhibits, many of which were on display for the first time outside of China, were simply exquisite. I couldn’t resist going back a second time, and if I hadn’t left it so late I may well have gone back again.