Born in Philadelphia, American countertenor Lawrence Zazzo studied English literature at Yale University and music at King's College, Cambridge, before taking up vocal studies at the Royal College of Music, London. Known particularly for his dramatic performances of heroic roles in Handel opera (Giulio Cesare, Radamisto, Serse, Rinaldo, Agrippina), his stage repertoire also includes works by composers as diverse as Monteverdi (L'Incoronazione di Poppea), Cavalli (La Calisto, Giasone, Eliogabalo), Scarlatti (Griselda), Gluck (Orfeo ed Euridice), Mozart (Mitridate), Britten (A Midsummer Night's Dream), Liebermann (Medea), Thomas Adès (The Tempest), Peter Eötvös (Three Sisters) and Jonathan Dove (Flight). He regularly appears in the world's foremost opera houses and festivals including the Metropolitan Opera, Royal
Opera House Covent Garden, La Monnaie, Netherlands Opera, Theater an der Wien, English National Opera, Paris Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Berlin Staatsoper, Glyndebourne, Innsbruck, Vienna, Santa Fè and Edinburgh.
He collaborates frequently with the conductors René Jacobs, Ivor Bolton, Emmanuelle Haim, Peter Eotvos, William Christie, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Trevor Pinnock , John Nelson, Christopher Hogwood, Paul Goodwin and Harry Bicket, and outside of his operatic appearances performs regularly in major concert and recital venues including the Konzerthaus Wien, Berlin's Philharmonie, Styriarte Graz, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Beaune and the Wigmore Hall.
His recordings include Rinaldo, Messiah, Griselda and Saul for Harmonia Mundi; Giulio Cesare, Serse, Fernando for Virgin Classics, Partenope for Chandos, Deborah for Naxos, Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb and Pergolesi's Stabat Mater for Columns Classics, Riccardo Primo and Duetti Amorosi for Sony BMG, as well as Byrdland, the viol consort music of William Byrd and Dowland with the Paragon Saxophone Quartet for Landor Records. This is his first recording with Evil Penguin Records.
Listener beware: Lunarcy is more than just a selection of lute songs by a singer who wants to pay homage to the pioneers of the genre. Although countertenor Lawrence Zazzo samples some early classics on this disc – such as Dowland's In darkness let me dwell or Purcell's From Rosy Bow'rs – he ventures far beyond the lute song's historical confines by including transcriptions of Mozart and Schumann in the programme, as well as a substantial body of 20th century repertoire written for countertenor. What these highly diverse song materials have in common is that they allow their singer to take you on a musical tour along the darkness and the light of the moon and the mind.
While the presence of Schumann, Mozart, and Howells in this lute song recital may shock the early music purist, there is nothing gratuitous or intentionally provocative about the programme. In fact, it emerged quite accidentally according to Lawrence: "musicians –especially countertenors – are like packrats in that they never throw away a piece of music they might be able to use later. Countertenor Charles Brett, who was my teacher, gave me Rory Boyle's Two Love Lyrics some 15 years ago, and I mentally and physically stored them away. A little later I came across James Bowman's Hyperion recording of
Geoffrey Burgon's Lunar Beauty cycle for countertenor and guitar, and when I found out they were originally conceived for the lute, they too found their way into my mental cupboard."
These two works later became the "pillars" of a lute song programme devoted to madness and the moon. Crucially, the relevance of these concepts extends beyond their being the topic of the majority of the songs on this disc. To begin with there is the oft-noted historical link between both. The relationship between mental instability (be it madness or melancholy) and the moon was well-known to the Elizabethan and Jacobean society in which Dowland and Purcell respectively functioned. In addition to regulating the tidal cycle, the moon was thought to affect the balance between the four humours which constituted the human body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. In view of the moon's power over the tides, it was also believed to impact the watery constitution of phlegm, the humour responsible for "cooling down" the brain's propensity for overheating. As such, the moon was thought to induce madness in susceptible individuals. But madness and the moon are not only medically and historically related. Together they delimit a conceptual space of law- and licentiousness: the night time over which the moon rules is a liminal space where normal rules do not apply (and abnormal behaviour is invisible), and where madness is a reason (or an excuse) for breaking conventional rules. It is in celebration of these multi-interrelated meanings that Lawrence Zazzo came up with the title "Lunarcy" for this recital.
The most modern songs in this recital – the two Love Lyrics for countertenor and lute by the Scottish composer Rory Boyle (° 1951) – pay homage to lunarcy in their titles Sonnet found in a deserted mad-house and My love in her attire does show her wit, but also in the poems' focus on erotic playfulness, a jocularity which is nicely embodied in the use of alliteration in the first poem. The Love Lyrics were originally commissioned by countertenor Charles Brett and first performed by him and the lutenist Robert Spencer at the Rattlinhope Festival in 1984. When asked about these songs, Rory Boyle reminisces about "going to Robert Spencer's house in London for a crash lesson in discovering how to write for the lute. As always when I am setting words, I took quite a long time in choosing the texts, and I just came across these two poems which appealed. Because I was writing for the lute, I did consciously try to recreate a sort of Elizabethan feel in my setting, and the words also suggested a neo-classical approach, as – at that time when the counter-tenor was a less common animal than it is now – did the voice."
It is fascinating to notice that Geoffrey Burgon's Lunar beauty cycle is so different from Boyle's Love Lyrics, in spite of the fact that the work was written and premiered only two years later than Boyle's (it was created by Nigel Perrin – the high voice of the King's Singers – at the Harrogate Festival in August 1986). While Boyle's is a Stravinsky-based idiom, the musical style of Geoffrey Burgon (1941-2010) has recurrently been referred to as "fluent" and "effortless". At a time when the most cerebral modernism was de rigueur in "serious" English music, Burgon had no scruples about writing accessible classical music for the concert hall, but also for television: in 1977 he scored a hit in the pop-charts with his Nunc dimittis theme music for BBC TV's John Le Carre adaptation Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. His scores for Brideshead Revisited, the Forsyte Saga and, more recently, Silent Witness have likewise become entrenched in the mind of countless viewers.
The six songs in the Lunar Beauty cycle use poems by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, two members of a circle of "thirties poets" with a common interest in the conflicts between external nature and inner personality, between body and spirit, and between erotic and platonic love. This lunar beauty presents a "virgin" idea of the moon as an uncreated entity existing outside nature and culture. It is set to a simple 6/8 rhythm and leans heavily on the singer's lower register. Lady, weeping at the crossroads is a contemporary ballad on a medieval subject; the music closely mirrors the dramatic progress of the journey with its unexpected ending. Orpheus is an enigmatic miniature in which Burgon seeks to capture the elusive quality of song/music by the use of fast notes in the upper register of the lute against the longer notes in the voice. Auden's poem Lullaby is ambiguous in tone because it is unclear whether the love professed is paternal or erotic and whether the object of that love is a child or an adult. It's possible Auden was uncomfortable with this ambiguity: the "hermit's carnal ecstasy" was later changed by Auden himself to the "hermit's sensual ecstasy" sung here. And, while the song superficially evokes Burgon's "gentle nocturnal world", in its uneven syncopations there is something slightly uncomfortable and disturbing in the music as well.
Not all the songs in this cycle deal with the moon, but almost all of them haunt the boundaries of such lunarcy themes as night, sleep and dreaming, conjuring up "an atmosphere of nostalgia, depicting a sepia scene of a gone but not forgotten era of English life" (from Burgon's obituary in The Telegraph on 23 September, 2010). If Burgon's music toys with mild feelings of nostalgia, we turn to John Dowland and Thomas Campion for the graver sense of loss which devolves into melancholy and even madness. Although Dowland and Campion were the most versatile song composers of Renaissance England, they were total opposites. In his preface to John Rosseter's Book of Airs of 1601, Campion defined the ideal English air as "short and well-seasoned"; in accordance with this definition, he set his poems plainly, with simple chordal accompaniment that never got in the way of the words. Due to this propensity for unassuming compositions, Campion is often considered second best to Dowland, but one may wonder whether a song like The cypress curtain of the night (1601) is second best to anything. The depression-induced insomnia and the certainty of grief beyond sleep and death are expressed in a musical texture which is entirely strophic, low on melodic ideas, but numbingly beautiful in its delicacy.
In the same preface to Rosseter's Book of Airs, Campion deplored the fashion observed in his days for songs "bated with fugue and chained with syncopation". The intendee of that gibe was in all probability John Dowland, whose achievement as a composer is so unique that it has taken on quasi-Shakespearean dimensions. Rather than constructing melody and lute accompaniment with a view to supporting the poem, Dowland achieved a perfect balance between the poetic possibilities of the text, the melodic expressivity of the voice part, and the harmonic qualities of the (quasi-)polyphonic lute accompaniment. Probably the most impressive testimony to this mastery is In darkness let me dwell, from the anthology A Musical Banquett, published by Dowland's son Robert in 1610. From the opening bars in which the lute sets the sombre mood, to the final repetition of the words "in darkness let me dwell" – when the voice projects the last note into the silence – Dowland shows his talent for integrating poetic meaning, melodic invention, and harmonic colouring into what Dowland scholar Diana Poulton labelled "the most poignant expression of anguished grief".
So multi-dimensionally meaningful is this song that few singers know what to do with it beyond indulging in melancholic brooding with a lot of indecision and almost no sense of direction. This is where it pays off to be an operatic countertenor, says Lawrence Zazzo: "as a creature of the stage I'm always interested in the dramatic possibilities of any music I sing. A lute song programme can so often be just a succession of pretty pearls, and I like all my programmes to have some sort of narrative flow. Even when that narrative concerns a kind of paralysis or depression (as in the case of madness, melancholy, or the moon's hypnotising light), I want the listener to feel that paralysis as somehow dramatically and musically intolerable."
But how then does Lawrence relate to a much simpler Dowland song as What poor astronomers, which even Diana Poulton – Dowland's most devoted scholar and admirer – refers to as "light and charming" but without "particular distinction"? Is it not much more challenging and rewarding to dig into the carefully wrought phrases of poetic giants such as Auden? "I really feel that I'm never fully aware of the possibilities of language, especially my native language, until I'm singing it. One becomes hyper-conscious of the colours, the rhythms, sometimes the percussiveness or abrasiveness of an English word or phrase, the "music" of language itself that a poet understands instinctively. I don't think it would be fair to say I relate more to the modern lyrics. If anything, I think I had to work harder to bring out the texts in the Elizabethan strophic songs—Campion's Cypress and Dowland's What poor astronomers—precisely because each stanza must fit the same music."
If What poor astronomers is the most diverting text in this recital, Purcell's From Rosy Bow'rs is probably the most dramatic. Composed near the end of his short life for Thomas D'Urfey's Don Quixote – some say that it was Purcell's very last composition – it is a powerful representation of the "mad song" genre which was wildly popular in late 17th century English life and theatre (it may be noted here that a visit to the Bethlehem – or Bedlam – hospital to watch the bizarre behaviour of the patients was a common outing for 17th century Londoners). In fact, From Rosy Bow'rs is not a true mad song, but a charade staged by Altisidora to convince the indifferent Don Quixote of her love for him. If Purcell's music fits D'Urfey's text like a glove, the song can also stand on its own as an extravagant but thoroughly affecting display of emotions. To Curtis Price, From Rosy Bow'rs transcends the stage for the dying Purcell, and "is a cry of real despair. The setting of "death" is bone-chilling". I'll sail upon the dog-star was one of the eight songs Purcell wrote for D'Urfey's A fool's preferment from 1688. It relies on intricately crafted counterpoint sustaining the "wild galactic imagery" of weather-coining and tying the ends of a rainbow together…
In keeping with the spirit of licentiousness and "borderline behaviour" generated by (or tolerated under) lunarcy, Lawrence challenges the limits of the classical lute air by trespassing beyond the confines of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era, and playing songs which were not conceived for countertenor, let alone for the lute. Herbert Howell's Full Moon (1919) is a fascinating arrangement of a poem by his friend Walter de la Mare, on the lunar experience of a small boy and the moon's subsequent evanescence – "she vanished and was gone" – simultaneously preserving and destroying innocence. Originally written for voice and piano in 1919 as part of the cycle of songs Peacock Pie, Howells deliciously evokes this "chaste sensuality" in a very slow pace and mysteriously suggestive harmonies based on fifths. Mozart's Abendempfindung and Schumann's Mondnacht are well-known icons of the piano lied genre. All three are performed in carefully adapted transcriptions for the Baroque arciliuto by Shizuko Noiri, the lute player on this disc.
When asked to comment on this adoption (or annexation) of materials which do not belong to his voice type, Lawrence claims that countertenors are in any case "trespassers": "very little of what I sing is actually written for my voice type (my Baroque opera roles, for example, were written for castrati, not countertenors). This means that repertoire selection was important for this disc, but also – and maybe even more so – a spirit of experimentation. While I knew that Abendempfindung would work in the lute song arrangement – because René Jacobs had already recorded it beautifully with Konrad Junghanel – I wasn't sure about Howells Full Moon until Shizuko and I sat down and "workshopped" it. I also initially chose Schubert's An dem Mond, as I was convinced – on first glance at the arpeggiato accompaniment style – that it would work better than Schumann's Mondnacht. When we played them both through, however, the latter appeared much more suited to our "instruments" than the former."
There's something very poignant about countertenor and lute: they are delicate instruments, and they lend intimacy and immediacy to any texture, whether or not originally conceived for them. Auden's Orpheus—which Burgon captures beautifully musically—is all about the fragile and elusive nature of music: its power is not in its physical constituents —volume, size, attack—but in its ability to conjure, through air vibrations set in motion by the voice and the lute strings. After you've listened to this disc, I hope you agree with me that Lawrence and Shizuko successfully conjure believeable versions of Elizabethan lute songs, Restoration consort songs, 20th century English (lute) songs, and German lieder which were not written for voice and lute,
but which strongly benefit from the transposition…
LAWRENCE ZAZZO (Countertenor)
