Great Performers: Emma Kirkby
For many music lovers, Emma Kirkby's pure, silvery voice personifies the Early Music movement of the 1980s and '90s. Throughout her career – and she's still singing at the age of 70 – she shunned the trappings of fame and renown, and remained true to herself: straightforward, uncomplicated and, above all, generous in her dealings with her public and her fellow musicians.
Read more…Emma Kirkby read English at Oxford, but alongside her studies she sang, and one choir she joined, Schola Cantorum of Oxford, was conducted by Andrew Parrott. Once she'd graduated she started to teach but found herself drawn more and more towards music. She joined another of Parrott's choirs, the Taverner Choir, which was to be a major force in the Early Music revival. At about this time, she started to sing lute and voice repertoire with Anthony Rooley and – the partnership that would put her name in front of her biggest audience – with the Academy of Ancient music and Christopher Hogwood.
Her career perfectly meshed with the wave of interest in music of the Renaissance and Baroque, and she rode that wave throughout the 1980s and '90s, and Decca's L'Oiseau-Lyre label would capture the results.
To hear Emma Kirkby's art distilled into its essence, listen to 'Where the bee sucks' from Thomas Arne's incidental music to Shakespeare's The Tempest. It's a perfect balance of crystalline diction (every word placed according to its meaning), voice (warmed by gentle vibrato – that she didn't use any vibrato is a myth), and an ideal relationship between singer and musical partners.
Kirkby's vocal longevity is due, no doubt, to the care with which she chose her repertoire throughout her long career. Though she started out singing music from the Renaissance, the bulk of the music she performed came from the 17th and 18th centuries. And she understood, innately, the scale of the music she tackled. She rarely found herself facing the full might of a symphony orchestra (though she did once sing in a performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony, conducted by Roger Norrington). And, coaxed by Christopher Hogwood, she did sing some Stravinsky in his neo-classical vein. A rare departure was an enchanting album of songs by the American Amy Beach, a cherishable recording for all fans of the singer.
Highlights from her 100 or so recordings have to be Handel's Messiah, recorded for L'Oiseau-Lyre in the company of the AAM and Christopher Hogwood – a recording that changed irreversibly our approach to this great choral work. Even 35 years after it was recorded, this classic recording sounds fresh and thrillingly original.
In both commercial and artistic terms, another AAM/Hogwood collaboration – a recording of Pergolesi's Stabat mater – was a huge success. It sees Kirkby alongside the countertenor James Bowman giving a performance of sublime beauty and incandescent elegance. Other gems include Vivaldi's Nulla in mundo pax sincera, Couperin's Leçons de ténèbres and Mozart's Exsultate jubilate.
Though she rarely sang opera, she can be heard on two recordings of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas – in the title role for Andrew Parrott in 1981, poised, slightly cool but beautifully characterised, and as a touchingly human Belinda to Catherine Bott's Dido on the 1994 recording directed by Christopher Hogwood. On both, her attention to the words, and the meaning behind those words is exquisite and dramatically so perfectly thought out. Her album of Mozart concert and early opera arias, again with the AAM and Hogwood, makes one regret that she didn't attempt some of his later operatic works.
Partnerships with London Baroque and the lutenist Jakob Lindberg enriched the 'autumn' of her career, and again it's that collegial sensitivity and generosity that shine out from every performance.
[Due to geo-blocking restrictions, some tracks might be unavailable in certain territories.]