Interview with Owain Park
by Bethany Tillerson (photo credits: Ash Mills)

This Sunday, Rob Kennedy speaks with Owain Park about The Gesualdo Six’s recent release, Lux Aeterna, an exploration of grief and our response to it. Owain Park serves as the director of this group of award-winning British consort singers.

ROB: Tell our listeners about The Gesualdo Six. Is it a sextet of equals, or do you direct both the music and its activities? 

PARK: Well, when we started The Gesualdo Six back in 2014, I was conducting six singers because we sang music by the Italian Composer Carlo Gesualdo. He wrote a set of Tenebrae Responsories, and we performed the Maundy Thursday sets, which is incredibly vivid chromatic music. A lot of the choirs that we worked with had conductors. But that sort of consort singing in Cambridge where the group was founded was certainly less common than big choirs of 20 to 30 people. So to have the flexibility of the vocal sounds, but also to have the creative vision of one person ultimately making the decisions and distilling the singers’ ideas proved to be very fruitful. In recent years, we found that I do a little bit more singing and we share the responsibilities between the members of the group. Recently we had a singer who was raised in the US come over and join us for a couple of years. He went back to be with his family near New York, and so we’ve been operating as only six people, largely unconducted, and that gives a very different flavor to rehearsals. We have people with very strong opinions about a certain piece that they might have sung somewhere else before, or who are very driven by contemporary works. But ultimately, it’s nice for everyone to know that I will be there to make a final call on things so that they can relax and not have to press their ideas too strongly. It creates a nice working environment, whereas I know that if everyone has an equal say, sometimes it’s very hard to make decisions. And that’s not just true in music, it is true in all walks of life. So we see ourselves a little bit like a sports team, if you like, with all of the individual players giving their best, but there’s a coach they’re looking at for the overall strategy about how we interact with each other and our audiences. 

ROB: Your recording, Lux Aeterna, offers a fine sampling of English anthems and motets centered around the theme of grief and how it affects each of our lives. Tell us your thinking behind the older selections. 

PARK: Well, we’ve been influenced by artists that have gone before us. We’re so lucky now to live in a world where we have the benefit of being able to listen and learn from fantastic recordings. Also, for those members that still work and coach, we can learn from them as well. To pick one example, Morales’ “Parce Mihi, Domini”, is a very famous piece sung by the Hilliard Ensemble. That piece has been in our conscience as singers for many, many years. It was a great privilege to record that work and set it alongside other works from the Renaissance. I try to bring various themes of grief and mourning together that weren’t too sad and despondent because, of course, while it’s very personal and it affects everyone differently, there is also hope in coming to terms with the fact that people have passed on and they left behind a legacy. And so the Morales piece asks a series of questions. Works by Byrd and Tallis take that a little bit further and give us more insight into the themes and paint a rather vivid picture of grief and responses to grief. But then, coming out the other side, “Thou Knowest, Lord, The Secrets of Our Hearts” by Purcell is a very tender, incredibly poignant work, one that is sung by singers all around the world who work in this choral tradition. And that is a very wonderful sort of personal text, because while Purcell was setting it around the funeral for a monarch, each of us can relate to that text, that we’re maybe not alone in this life. And we can enjoy each other’s company and celebrate the good things that come from our lives together. 

ROB: You also include some contemporary compositions. Can you tell our listeners about the men and women behind these works? 

PARK: Singing modern works by composers that are largely still alive is incredibly exciting because, of course, while it’s a tradition that’s been around for many hundreds of years, if we don’t continue to create and cultivate new works, then it will die out. And so we make a conscious effort to ask composers to write for us and to rearrange works that composers have written for us, and to make those available to other people who want to perform them. It’s incredibly exciting to be premiering a piece by Joanna Marsh, which sets a very powerful text that looks at another of life’s great events, the marriage ceremony, and celebrates that union until death do us part. That gives us a slightly different look on the whole album’s perspective. 

We sing other works by composers like Donna McKevitt’s hypnotic setting of the Nunc Dimittis, which she wrote for us. A piece that wasn’t written for the group, but one which we love performing and I think sums everything up beautifully, is called “A Good Night” by Richard Rodney Bennett. It sets a text by Francis Quarles and finishes, “Close now thine eyes and rest secure”. That sums up the whole album, the fact that we’re closing our eyes and sleeping, but we’ve come full circle and we feel satisfied with what we’ve been able to do. 

ROB: It’s a wonderful album and we’ve enjoyed airing several tracks from it here on The Classical Station. Thank you for sharing the information about it. 

Join us for Owain Park’s interview at 7 PM on Sunday, May 28th! Download our app, stream online on TheClassicalStation.org, or tune your radio to 89.7 FM.