In 2006 an early medieval manuscript, the Faddan More Psalter, was discovered in a bog in central Ireland. The collection of psalms on its 60 vellum pages was only partly decipherable, but nevertheless the idea of this precious artefact preserved in peat and mud for more than 1,000 years caught the imagination of David Fennessy, whose half hour-long Bog Cantata, commissioned by the Dunedin Consort, takes the psalter, and the bog in which it was found, as its starting point.
Rather than setting the surviving fragments of text from the discovery itself, Fennessy imagined “a piece of music that had itself been buried for centuries in the bog and dug up”, and asked the dramatist Marina Carr for a series of texts that explore the bog and the people who might have lived, died and been preserved within it. Her contributions are spare, laconic and allusive, and Fennessy’s treatment of them, sometimes as solo arias, sometimes involving eight singers, is equally economical. The vocal lines often just unfold over sustained pitches from the accompanying baroque ensemble of organ, recorders and strings, which either grumble in the bass or sing in the high treble, though just occasionally the instrumental textures well up into something much darker and more threatening. The result is curiously powerful and direct, timeless in an utterly convincing way.
With the exception of a jaw’s harp, whose other-worldly twanging colours the opening and closing section of his cantata, the bass-heavy instrumental ensemble that Fennessy employs is identical to that used by Bach for his Actus Tragicus BWV 106, which was one of three baroque pieces that preceded the premiere, all immaculately conducted by John Butt. The fifth of Jan Dismas Zelenka’s Lamentations was delivered with dramatic immediacy by tenor Ed Lyon, while soprano Nardus Williams and baritone Roderick Williams made the most of the consoling solo opportunities offered by Telemann’s funeral cantata Du aber Daniel, gehe hin.
• Repeated at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, on 7 March
