EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble

REVIEWS

‘EXAUDI, the extraordinary ensemble of vocal virtuosi’
     The Sunday Times

‘12 musically superb and technically accomplished singers’
     New York Times

‘deftly convincing performances of dizzyingly complex works’
     The Guardian

‘the dazzle of EXAUDI’s vocal pyrotechnics’
     Financial Times

Rihm: Sieben Passions-Texte
Aldeburgh Easter Festival, March 2008

'...a perfectly judged short concert, given by the outstanding vocal group EXAUDI. The centrepiece of the hour-long sequence was the first complete performance in this country of Wolfgang Rihm's Seven Passion Texts, settings of the Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Week, which he completed two years ago. Around them EXAUDI's director, James Weeks, had arranged two sequences of Orlande de Lassus's passiontide motets, some to the same texts that Rihm's cycle uses.

'It made a wonderfully contrasted and concentrated experience. Weeks' fascinating programme notes drew comparisons between the richness and occasional grandeur of Rihm's six-part writing and Bruckner's motets, but in fact the frame of reference is wider still, with an expressive control of dissonance and an emotional directness that are very much Rihm's own. EXAUDI conveyed all that with a confidence that belied the technical challenges the singers were meeting so effortlessly. It was hard to imagine this music better performed, and there could be no better context in which to hear it.' 5 stars, Andrew Clements, The Guardian

'On a windswept, stormy Saturday afternoon above the swollen Blyth estuary there was to be found an hour of perfection. Weather patterns, musical patterns, a superbly attentive and almost cough-free audience with a group of superb singers in the incomparable setting of Blythburgh church - such were the ingredients of this golden hour. The singers of the justly celebrated EXAUDI compelled instant attention with their secure treading of the sometimes rocky harmonic paths of Orlande de Lassus...if Lassus is occasionally rocky then Rihm is often - vertiginous? To begin a devotional piece quietly with such grating dissonances requires musicianship of the highest order and nerves of the toughest steel...James Weeks and the members of EXAUDI will know from the atmosphere and the response that they delivered something special and this review can only hint at what those lucky enough to be present experienced. At the risk of repetition, perfection.' East Anglian Daily Times

NOW at Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust, 28/11/07
'On Tuesday, contemporary vocal ensemble Exaudi gave a startling object lesson in just how flexible the human voice is. They huffed, puffed, popped and even sang a programme that encompassed the extreme demands of such radicals as Luigi Nono, Wolfgang Rihm and Michael Finnissy... The microtonal eccentricities of reclusive Italian aristocrat Giacinto Scelsi's Tre Canti Sacri sent a chilling ring round the voluble Greyfriars acoustics, amplified by the mind-blowing dynamic range of this eight-piece ensemble... From the barely audible esotericism of James Saunders's #281107 to Finnissy and Nono, Rihm's Quo Me Rapis and onwards through the new works, Exaudi made this challenging repertoire seem easy and, more importantly, a thoroughly enjoyable experience.' The Scotsman

'Though Ockeghem, Ferneyhough, Tallis and Xenakis are proclaimed points of Exaudi's compass, this sensational consort of voices rings many changes on its repertoire of music new and old. So nobody should have been surprised last night to find James Weeks's young singers - eight of them on this occasion, plus a solo violin more visible than audible - stealing their way from Giacinto Scelsi to Luigi Nono, and Wolfgang Rihm to Michael Finnissy. To hear this immaculate London-based group in Scotland, in Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust's belated opening event of its season, was a privilege and an adventure, a series of soundings softly spun, articulated, hummed, sighed, floated, whistled, murmured, moaned, intensified in what proved to be the atmospherically accommodating and flexible surroundings of Greyfriars Kirk. What we heard was something very special and so rigorously prepared that even the quietest music - and much of this concert seemed on the point of disappearing - gripped your attention, stretched your ears, challenged your senses as effectively as the moments when the singers suddenly let rip, or sustained a prolonged crescendo on a single note, or otherwise took you by surprise. What mattered in the end was that it was all about music, and that each of the nine pieces - not least Weeks's own space odyssey evoking Venus in transit, or the gale-force wind that blew through Christopher Fox's portrayal of Wordsworth, or the ethereal beauty of Finnissy's tribute to Tippett - worked its magic in the context of the whole.' The Herald

Italian programme at Aldeburgh Festival, 9/6/07

‘EXAUDI, the extraordinary ensemble of vocal virtuosi, juxtaposed music by the Venetian master, Monteverdi, and Gesualdo with impossibly difficult music by the moderns, Scelsi, Nono, Castiglioni and Sciarrino, making them sound both easy and exultant. A dazzling Aldeburgh opener.’ Sunday Times

‘EXAUDI – 12 musically superb and technically accomplished singers, 4 women and 8 men, directed by James Weeks – first set a contemplative mood by singing plainchant. This was followed by Three Tenebrae Responsories by Gesualdo, the aristocratic composer of intensely chromatic vocal works…EXAUDI’s performances here were luminous and haunting. They captured the murky mood of the music, which, in the reverberant acoustics of the beautiful church, dating partly from Norman times, had a hallucinatory effect. Luigi Nono’s astringently beautiful Sarà Dolce Tacere (1960) concluded the program. Do all the singers in EXAUDI have perfect pitch? I doubt it. Yet how else to explain that they were able to find and hold the pitches during the skittish, leaping photo: Jonathan Player
passages of this complex 12-tone score?’
Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

‘James Weeks’s small vocal ensemble always appears in capital letters – and for good reason. Theirs is an exceptionally robust, high-fibre way with both plainchant and the music that grew out of it. After relishing the emotional extremes of Gesualdo’s Three Tenebrae Responsories, EXAUDI gave the British première of Salvatore Sciarrino’s compelling take on the dark, pre-Easter service: his Responsorio delle Tenebre… This was vocal experimentation of the highest expressivity: hypersensitised wails and sighs bending the line and providing tortured individual commentary on the formal plainchant verses.’ The Times

‘EXAUDI’s programme in Orford Church featured stylishly sung Monteverdi and Gesualdo pieces alongside music by their modern Italian successors. James Weeks directed deftly convincing performances of dizzyingly complex works from the last few decades by Castiglioni, Nono and Scelsi.’ The Guardian

‘In the afternoon the EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble returned to Orford Church, scene of their triumph at last year's festival. Following the Italian theme, they sang Gesualdo and Monteverdi, and then jumped feet first into the 20th century with pieces of mind-bending complexity by Sciarrino, Castiglioni, Scelsi and Nono. This is music that few people are likely to hear more than once, but if that one time is a performance by EXAUDI they are not likely to forget it. Where else are there sopranos like these, guaranteed to hit the notes other choral singers cannot reach?’ Financial Times

Spitalfields Winter Festival, 18/12/06

'This Spitalfields Winter Festival concert kicked off with Tallis polyphony at its most exultant in the 20-minute Gaude gloriosa Dei mater. Four hundred years and one hour later, we ended with a cough — the final notated sound in the panoply of siren cries, shouting, whistling, and glissandi that make up the angry, fearsome Xenakis score Nuits, dedicated to political prisoners. To successfully combine both stylistic extremes in the same concert takes stamina, skill, bravery and cheek. No problem for EXAUDI: James Weeks’s young vocal ensemble, 12-strong in this manifestation, has never sought the easy life. A different aural jolt arrived with the selection from Michael Finnissy’s Seven Sacred Motets of 1991. We usually think of Finnissy as a fiendish creator of barbed-wire jungles; yet, driven by his faith, he stripped himself down in these marvellous pieces to several florid vocal lines arching over insistent drones. Music of contemplation, this; but music with teeth and sinews. EXAUDI easily found the eloquence and beauty in what on the page might seem spare, even arid. It was all over, without an interval, inside of 70 minutes. If only more concerts were like this: focused, no fat, risky and brilliant.' The Times

Michael Finnissy at 60, 23/8/06

'EXAUDI's concert was a real highlight in a weekend of extraordinary performances. Rather than simply being a pastiche of sacred modal music Finnissy completely inhabits this sound world, and you do not have to share the composer’s faith to recognise the conviction in the music. On the evidence of this concert there cannot be many vocal ensembles around who can touch Exaudi.' New Notes

Aldeburgh Festival Ferneyhough Portrait, 11/6/06

'There are some performances that you know will be etched on your memory forever, such is their intensity and power. The EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble, a group of young singers conducted by their founder James Weeks, sang Brian Ferneyhough's 1969 Missa Brevis with thrilling commitment and immediacy, revealing this masterpiece of modernism to be among the great settings of these archetypal texts.

'As with all of Ferneyhough's music, the Missa Brevis teems with complexity and extremity: words were pulverised into syllables or atomised into screams and whispers. The Gloria ended with an existential shout and the Kyrie began with a vision of a musical abyss, the basses at the bottom of their register and the sopranos attempting to scale stratospheric heights. But Weeks and the EXAUDI singers somehow alchemised all this ferocious technical difficulty into music of shattering directness.

'The terrifying textures of the music created a sense of awe and wonder: by throwing out traditional ideas about how these texts should be put to music, Ferneyhough's piece created its own kind of transcendence. The final seconds of the work were astonishing, as one of the sopranos held an impossibly high note for an unfeasibly long time. It was a moment that symbolised the transfiguring power of this "short mass".' Tom Service, The Guardian

‘As for [Ferneyhough’s] Missa Brevis (1969), the chamber choir EXAUDI’s superconfident rendering under James Weeks at Orford Church was a bang-smash hit and left me feeling that this wildly uninhibited but cannily calculated work is as much a 1960s icon as Stockhausen’s vocal Stimmung from the previous year.’ Paul Driver, The Sunday Times

'What looked in advance a heavy-duty programme of music ancient and modern – rapt unaccompanied choral works by Obrecht and Ockeghem alongside ferociously aggressive new pieces by Brian Ferneyhough – went exactly as one might have expected until the last 20 minutes. That was when the EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble launched themselves into Ferneyhough’s jaw-droppingly difficult Missa Brevis. As individual voices sparred with each other in complex combative groups and sopranos soared to stratospheric heights that one would have thought out of human reach, the adrenalin level reached fever pitch – and not just for the audience.' Richard Fairman, Financial Times

'If Irvine Arditti’s feverish playing of [Ferneyhough's] Unsichtbare Farben was gobsmacking, EXAUDI’s performance of the impossibly difficult and wonderfully effective Missa Brevis took the breath away.' Keith Clarke, Classical Music Magazine

Aldeburgh Festival Tippett Celebration, 11/6/05

‘The fine choir EXAUDI, under James Weeks, marked Tippett’s centenary with an afternoon programme, in airy Orford Church, of the composer’s a cappella works set beside Elizabethan music that inspired them. Dance, Clarion Air really could set the air to dancing when its madrigalian counterpoint was so skilfully launched. Most moving, I found, were the ornate, rapturous lullaby Gwenllian, from Four Songs from the British Isles (five, actually, for the rediscovered Over the Sea to Skye was included too), and the fail-safe, fathomlessly emotional spirituals from A Child of Our Time, for which the performers put aside their scores and sang straight from the heart.’ Paul Driver, The Sunday Times

Intimate Leaves, Purcell Room, London, 17/3/05

‘Under James Weeks’s direction, EXAUDI are proving themselves a very versatile group: this concert juxtaposed medieval and contemporary works, sung with the sort of precision that shows how, in some ways at least, vocal music has come full circle...The richest seam explored here was the late medieval style of “ars subtilior”, whose composers treated the usual themes of courtly love with great intensity. In various combinations the singers formed close ensembles in the superb music of Jacob de Senleches, Philipoctus de Caserta and Johannes Ciconia. Le ray au soleyl, attributed to Ciconia, featured three female voices whose overlapping evoked flashes of light. This music also served as the basis for a structured improvisation by Christian Wolff, part of John Cage’s New York circle, and Cage himself was heard in the ravishing simplicity of performances by Clare Wilkinson and Elin Manahan Thomas of A Flower and The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs.’ John Allison, The Times

Reviews of EXAUDI's recordings are available here.