THE German nun Hildegard of Bingen (c.1098-1179), was an extraordinary figure: writer, philosopher, mystic visionary, medical practitioner, and composer, who has become something of a 21st-century icon, not least because of her persistence in standing up to the male church hierarchy.
The Voice Trio — Victoria Couper, Clemmie Franks, and Emily Burn — have a special affinity with Hildegard’s music. They came together in the reverberant space of LSO St Luke’s, Old Street, in London, last month, in a “piece of concert theatre”, “Hildegard Transfigured: A Medieval Trance for the 21st Century”, in collaboration with the composer Laura Moody and the visual artist Innerstrings, which explored Hildegard’s visions: what she called the “living light”.
It began in atmospheric darkness. The singers in long flowing dresses walked in slowly, singing Hildegard’s antiphon O Successores, and bearing candles, the only point of light until they assembled in front of a screen that showed sharply coloured projected images. The long and smooth melismatic lines of the nun’s compositions Unde Quocumque Venientes and O Virtus Sapientiae had a quietly ecstatic freshness, contrasting throughout with the sharper and more percussive settings of her words set for the group. It was at once timeless and ultra-modern.
Some neurologists have argued that Hildegard’s visions were migraine-induced. Laura Moody, herself a sufferer, has tried to capture some of that relentlessness and pressure in Hildegard Portraits (2021): rhythmic, virtuosic settings of extracts from her letters created for this programme. Especially attractive were “Humility”, with its hypnotic repeated “Poor little woman though I am. A poor little form of a woman”; “O Woman”, with its rustic drone and shout of triumph; and the hummed accompaniment and recurring five-note motif of “Love”.
The same quiet virtuosity was evident in Marcus Davidson’s Musical Harmony, a piece whose chordal structure looked back to the Middle Ages; his O Boundless Ecclesia; and Emily Davis’s folk-influenced How Sweetly You Burn.
The group had met in Oxford Girls’ Choir and had discovered Hildegard’s music while singing in Stevie Wishart’s early-music group, Sinfonye. Here, Wishart’s O Choruscans Lux Stellarum used the very top of a solo soprano’s range to depict the glisten of starlight and the glow of gems.
Anyone looking at the ever-moving images on the screen might be swiftly on the way to a migraine of their own. Better to close your eyes, and allow Moody’s final The Living Light, with its extended repetitions, to wash over you, as it built slowly to its climax. Beautiful atmospheric music, wonderfully performed.