Who wouldn't jump at the chance to be invited to a press conference on a beautiful spring day at a gorgeous location, followed by a lovely concert? You've no doubt enjoyed those fine days at the end of April, and you might even be familiar with the venue—the Abbey of Park in Leuven.
As a music lover, you might know that the first gatehouse of that abbey complex is the House of Polyphony is, the seat of the Alamire Foundation. But that press conference took place in another, even larger gatehouse on the abbey grounds, in the Norbert Gate, because that's also where part of the Foundationis located. It's an extremely important workplace, if not the most important! It bears the name 'Library of Voices .' After all, their
mobile digital laboratory is housed here, which they can deploy anywhere in the world to digitize music manuscripts—the entire polyphonic heritage from the 15th and 16th centuries, wherever it may be. It was quite a feat when the team managed to digitize and unlock more than 13,500 items from the Vatican libraries in 2012 in their IDEM database, theIntegrated Database for Early Music Alamire Foundation Not only making all those precious manuscripts accessible for scholarly research by musicologists, but also enabling a musical valorization that brings those works back to life and explores new performance practices, all in collaboration with professional musicians and specialized ensembles.
With the Sound Lab they can also study the layering, the individual voices that together form the polyphonic texture, but moreover also experiment with the historical acoustics of certain spaces and add them, for example. The Alamire Foundation also embraces AI (yes, really) and XR ("Extended Reality Technology") to design immersive installations where visitors can experience that historical music in its original acoustic context. Such an immersive experiential space, a virtual dome of polyphony, is coming to the Leuven Predicant Church. It is the next project with which director Bart Demuyt wants to make a splash for LOV 2030, when Leuven is European Capital of Culture. Such an immersion in a multidimensional representation of both the visual and auditory aspects of polyphonic music was already realized last year during the exhibition “Knowledge in Sight” on the occasion of 600 years of KU Leuven, and the Sollazzo Ensemble was responsible for that.
High time, thought Bart Demuyt, to present their new CD: Flamboyance, created on commission from the Alamire Foundation. It is a reference to the final phase of Gothic architecture where everything became more ornate and exuberant—and so did the music. You can read all about that change in sound during that period in the excellent essay by Pieter Mannaerts in the CD booklet. It goes without saying that those terms 'ornate' and 'flamboyant' also apply to the performance; you hear an expanded (20!) ensemble in a decidedly spirited and festive mood, conducted by Anna Danilevskaia.
Phaedrus Ensemble
Mara Winter (traverso), Miriam Trevisan (vocals), Liane Schneider, Charlotte Schneider and Luis Martinez Pueyo (traverso)
Among those musicians was Mara Winter, a specialist in medieval and Renaissance flute. She was there that day with her group Phaedrus as guests in the Abbey Church at the Passion of Voices festival. It was the cherry on top. Four musicians on the most basic forms of those old traversos, without keys, without mouthpiece, from soprano to bass, accompanied by drums and lute plus a singer.
They brought a selection of Chansons from the collections of Margaret of Austria and Maximilian I, thus bridging the Burgundian and Habsburg traditions. Gems by Henri Isaac, Josquin des Prez, Johannes Okeghem and anonymous works among others from the Leuven Chansonnier (La plus dolente…), with or without arrangements by Mara Winter, who has no qualms about experimenting with three- or four-part arrangements. A delightful introduction to that earlier traverso consort practice, supplemented with drums, lute and voice. A lovely whole with warm, soft but occasionally also spirited sounds. Yet another illustration of that passion for uncovering lesser-known repertoire in a "different" way. Alamire Foundation to expose lesser-known repertoire in a different light.
