 Recorded in 2015 and 2016, mixed and mastered in 2017 and 2018 this album with the the general title “Michael Finnissy“ brings together four of the most virtuosic and spectacular works ever written for vocal ensemble. Spanning four decades of Michael Finnissy's career: EXAUDI's programme presents two works from the mid-1970s, Cipriano and Tom Fool's Wooing, in which extreme vocal gymnastics are given an urgently erotic charge. Kelir (1981) is a powerful vocal tableau of Xenakis-like intensity, made from the syllables of Javanese ritual formulae. The more recent Gesualdo: Libro Sesto (2012-13) engages with the tortured madrigalism of the Italian master, presenting what Finnissy describes as 'fantasies...about music, about love and death, about the voice.' Is not song that arena where the voice is so spectacularly displayed, fuelled by so many breathless propulsions, fantasies, sexualities, and dreams?’ — Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth. The voice has a central place in Michael Finnissy’s output. His is an art of line, of connective lyric movement spun out over a breath; it is also a deeply humanist art, an art in ardent search of human connection, of which the voice, reaching out from the depths of the body into the world around us, is the primal vehicle. Finnissy’s work manifests across the decades an abiding concern with the complex nature of this most bodily, most physical, most personal of instruments – what it is to give voice, to vocalise, to speak or sing in different contexts and different ways, private or public, as an individual or as part of a collective. The four works on this recording, spanning forty years, show Finnissian vocality at its most blazingly intense: displays of virtuosity that push mind and body to the limits of their flexibility, reach, stamina and control. The most recent work, Gesualdo: Libro Sesto, offers seven ‘fantasies…about music, about love and death, about the voice,’ as the composer writes, drawing on fragments of music and on texts from Gesualdo’s final madrigal book in a cycle of almost operatic scope. In the early ‘dramatic madrigal’ Cipriano, St Cyprian rigidly resists the carnal temptations of a Demon, played with flamboyant excess by the rest of the ensemble; Tom Fool’s Wooing (which lay unperformed for almost forty years before the present performance was recorded) is even more vocally extravagant, a celebration of marriage and the joys of eros, incorporating Eastern European love poetry, Spenser’s Epithalamion and an English mummer’s play. Kelir, the most abstract but also perhaps most rawly physical of the four, takes its title from the name given to the curtain onto which shadow-puppets are projected in Javanese wayang kulit (puppet theatre); by extension, writes Finnissy, ‘it is also a curtain onto which our interpretations of the world, and our fantasies, are projected.’
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