Restoring Forgotten Brilliance
VICTORIA KINGHAM talks to Carina Cosgrave about the Sabi Ensemble
Going to a concert of classical music, we expect to see accomplished performers playing written music perfectly. We are often delighted, especially when the quality of the music and the overall performance exceeds our expectations. Audiences for classical music in St Leonards and Hastings are especially appreciative, and this in turn encourages musicians and brings out their best.
Carina Cosgrave
What we don’t normally take into consideration, and perhaps we ought to, is the amount of work, practice, research, and basic thought that go towards producing just that one performance. Talking to bass player and early music professor Carina Cosgrave about her new nonet, Sabi, brought this home.
She is internationally known and in demand as a double-bass player, but she also plays various traditional bass instruments, among them the violone. The group she will bring to St Leonards is newly formed this year, from nine outstanding players. They aim to give audiences a taste of music by composers who, while well-known and widely performed in their lifetimes, have been forgotten or marginalised since their deaths. There are, indeed, forgotten geniuses in every field of the Arts: the reasons they have been forgotten are often nothing to do with their actual body of work or its quality, but can be political, prejudicial, social or economic. But there is a welcome trend, nowadays, for rediscovery, and Carina Cosgrave’s project is part of this trend.
It isn’t at all straightforward. First there are the instruments. A musician has to know something of the way that their particular instrument sounded in the ensembles of, say, the mid-nineteenth century when Louise Farrenc (one of the composers Sabi will perform) was in her productive heyday. They have then to find an instrument that is capable of making that particular sound. “What we often do,” explains Cosgrave, “is to find an instrument and then take it back in time. You might change the bridge, the strings, the angle of the neck, put different tensions on the strings – it depends how far back you want to take it.” There are specialist musical technicians who are able to do these things, in consultation with the instrumentalist: “often you’re working from drawings” she continues. I wondered where the other instruments are found. “Some of the wind players pick things up on EBay! Someone’s maybe had them sitting in the attic for ages, and they don’t look like modern instruments, but they might be exactly what they’re looking for. Leo [Duarte, the oboe player] has a few oboes that he’s found that way. So that produces quite a different sound. It’s a much bigger job than I ever imagined before we started getting into it.
“So we’ve got some really beautiful nineteenth-century wind instruments. They have less keys, different key systems. French bassoons around the end of the 19th century have a really different sound. And there are two different bassoons, French and German.”
Cosgrave plays several instruments, most with a bass register. I wondered how she would describe the difference in sound between the modern instrument and one that might have featured in a chamber orchestra two hundred years ago. “One of the most obvious differences, when you’re listening, is that the strings are made of different material. A bass that you’d be used to hearing now would have metal strings. The strings I use on the baroque bass are gut strings, and the makers use traditional string-making techniques. You get a very different colour. I had a student the other day who came to a concert and described the string section sound as ‘chocolatey’. And we’re using different bows as well.”
We were able to hear an elegant demonstration of the chocolatey sound during Carina’s talk at Afri-Co-Lab. She and cello player Ruth Alford highlighted the difference in sound made by instruments with traditional gut strings. They played a lovely duet by Farrenc in which the cello and the bass melodies wound round each other and replied to each other in successive, elegant phrases. It was a small, intimate gathering – the room had been draped with red velvet curtains, old candlesticks, and copies of original music, for the occasion. Another point was that some of the old manuscripts have mistakes in them – ‘how do you know?’ was one of the questions, and the original jarring discord and its suggested replacement were demonstrated.
Carina says she was ‘lucky’ to get a scholarship to the Royal College to study a PG Diploma in music. I am sure that for that particular college, luck had very little to do with it. Would she then call herself a musicologist, I wondered? “Absolutely not. I am interested in the music making of the past, but I guess the thing that I’m most interested in, is how that [theoretical] knowledge might change what one does in the performing sphere. I can study context and find out what influences they might have had, so if I know the music of the people they studied with and I can see the link, that helps me to think about how I might perform the piece.”
Carina’s full titles are Professor of the Baroque Double Bass and Professor of Historical Bass, at the Royal College of Music. Her current primary interest is in marginalised composers. Besides Farrenc, Sabi will present pieces by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (yes, he was named after the poet, only the name order was changed) and George Onslow. Her playing can be heard on a whole range of award-winning recordings with internationally famous chamber ensembles and orchestras. She is however in demand for all different kinds of music and has, for example, performed on stage with Kendrick Lamar and Massive Attack. She loves that eclecticism, and thrives on it. I wondered, given the ubiquity of the double bass in jazz music, whether she plays jazz? “I don’t play it, but I love it,” she says. She came to improvisation late in her musical journey, and in baroque and historical music, when it does occur, it’s quite a different thing. But there are nevertheless many opportunities for different ornamentation, and on older instruments glissando and portamento, sliding down from one note to the next.
It was an enormous privilege to talk to Carina Cosgrave, and it will be an equal privilege to hear the ensemble. Sounds St Leonards has teamed up with PRS Foundation and Afri-Co-Lab to present the concert, which promises to be as brilliant in the performance as its composers were in their own time.
Sabi Ensemble will play at St John’s Church, Pevensey Road, TN38 0LA on 25 October. See carinacosgrave.co.uk/tour and follow the link for tickets. See sabiensemble.co.uk for more about the music and the musicians. Tickets also direct from Eventbrite at eventbrite.com/e/carina-cosgrave-the-sabi-ensemble-tickets-809074211747.
SABI ENSEMBLE ARE
Carina Cosgrave, double bass; Catherine Martin, violin; Clifton Harrison, viola; Jennifer Morsches, cello; Leo Duarte, oboe; Georgia Browne, flute; Fiona Mitchell, clarinet; Nivanthi Karunaratne, horn; Rebecca Hammond, bassoon.
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply