A Madrigal Journey – KorMalta

KorMalta continues to go from strength to strength, and offer plenty of fun along the way for audience and performers.

A Madrigal Journey was an intelligently conceived and beautifully executed lunchtime concert. The programme's promise "to explore the art of painting with sound across five centuries of choral history" was fulfilled, as the ensemble traced a vivid arc from Renaissance madrigal to contemporary part-song with clarity and poise.

I just wish more of the intention had been available on the day. Because the programming was highly intelligent. The madrigal was framed not simply as a historical genre but as an "artistic idea: the union of poetry, nature, and emotion," and the performance bore that out in the way each piece illuminated its text, from the sprightly awakenings of dawn to the suspended calm of night.

Beginning with Salomone Rossi's *Con la luce e col canto* and moving through Morley, Monteverdi and Banchieri to Britten, Elgar, Saint-Saëns, Mendelssohn, Stanford and the modern voices of Carmelo Pace, Bruno Bettinelli and Matteo Magistrali, the concert felt like a single, carefully plotted narrative rather than a stitched-together anthology.

An accomplished quintet — Mariette Borg and Alexandra Camilleri Gambin (sopranos), Bianca Simone (alto), Lorenzo Bellagamba (tenor) and Riccardo Bianchi (bass) — proved an ideal vehicle for this concept. Small enough to give the music a vivid intimacy, yet sufficiently varied to accommodate the wide stylistic spread from Renaissance polyphony to Romantic lushness.

Throughout, one sensed the "specific vocal architecture" that the notes highlight paying dividends: the upper voices wove those "sonic textures" that made images of shadow, light and birdsong almost tactile, while the lower parts provided a firm yet flexible foundation.

Interpretatively, the ensemble's priorities were clearly text and affect. The notion of *affetti* — the "internal movements of the soul" — was translated in singing that tracked the rhetoric of each line, especially in Monteverdi's *Sfogava con le stelle* and *Zefiro torna e'l bel tempo rimena*. In Britten's *The succession of the four sweet months*, the overlapping texts and criss-crossing lines never turned to confusion; instead, they created that "impression of time unfolding all at once" that the notes describe, with each voice characterfully delineated yet scrupulously balanced. The Romantic items, notably Saint-Saëns' *Calme des nuits* and Stanford's *The Blue Bird*, benefited from a transparent approach that favoured luminous tuning and long-breathed phrasing over luxuriant weight, allowing the harmonies' inherent colour to glow.

Perhaps the most affecting stretch came towards the close. Stanford's still waters and distant bird in *The Blue Bird* offered one of the evening's most serene moments, the ensemble sustaining the fragile textures with admirable control. Matteo Magistrali's *Goodnight, my love*, written to Paul Laurence Dunbar's sea-faring poetry and dedicated to Bianchi, his family and the friends of KorMalta, brought the journey "into the contemporary world" with a calm, flowing tempo that the performers shaped into something both intimate and expansive. The sense of personal connection between composer, conductor and ensemble was palpable, lending the conclusion a warm, almost valedictory glow.

Situated within KorMalta's broader "season of light, legacy, and innovation," A Madrigal Journey felt less like a one-off and more like a statement of intent: that Malta's national choir can honour historical roots while speaking in a contemporary voice, and can "step into the heart of the music" by placing text, image and emotional truth at the centre of performance.