STEVIE WISHART [UK / Australia]
medieval fiddle, hurdy-gurdy
Director of Sinfonye

About Stevie Wishart

As a composer and performer on violin, hurdy-gurdy, voice and electronics, Wishart's music explores medieval and contemporary extremes. Moving between Australia and Europe, her work also draws on these contrasting landscapes and histories (bush/urban).

She formed the group Sinfonye in 1986 to explore medieval music based on improvisatory skills derived from traditional musics and performance practises recreated from historical research. Explorations with archaic music traditions have included travelling through Rajastan to study 'kemanche' players and epic balladists of the Thar desert, working with singers from occitan speaking communities in southern France, and with 'rabel' players in the isolated mountain villages of Cantabria, Spain. Playing with musicians steeped in a localised and relatively isolated aural tradition has been a great inspiration for her.

Her most recent medieval project is the CD Plus Red Iris (Glossa Nouvelle Vision), and features the most virtuosic instrumental music of the time in the form of the "istampite" from 14th century Italy. It creates a medieval dreamscape effectively mixing fresco images, audio fragments (bells, birds and Vespas) and quicktime video. RED IRIS LIVE is a "docuconcert" which brings together medieval music and data and slide projection, sound-design and movement in a unique, new media presentation. Together with a keen involvement in improvised and electronic music, this has formed a compositional style which frequently combines various forms of musical notation and recorded sound.

In live performance, composed and improvised processes overlap in a collision of medieval and contemporary sound-worlds. After a good number of recordings for Hyperion and several other labels, she is currently recording the complete Hildegard von Bingen for Celestial Harmonies and working on a wide range of projects for Glossa.

RED IRIS
13th-century instrumental pieces

"Many people have recorded the 14th-century instrumental dances that appear only in a single manuscript now in London. Apart from some pieces apparently for keyboard, they are almost the only known early works for a solo melody instrument. The nine pieces (out of a total of 15) presented here offer no repertorial novelty. What is new is the way Stevie Wishart plays them. She views the shorter pieces as dances, to be performed with percussion accompaniment. They are done extremely well, with Jim Denley and Pedro Estevan producing a stunning range of sounds from their various percussion instruments. But the longer ones are treated as elaborate and weaving instrumental solos, without any accompaniment. Stevie Wishart plays them on the vielle and, in one case, on the hurdy-gurdy, never rushing, never tempted to gloss over the many unexpected details in the lines. This kind of approach seems extremely productive: it stresses the sheer quality and inventiveness of the melodies, and it perhaps aligns them with their true historical context, the repertory of long monophonic lais from the 14th-century.
That in its turn somehow makes the pieces far more than virtuoso showpieces. But it says much for the power of Stevie Wishart’s playing that she keeps the music constantly interesting and is invariably persuasive. The disc comes with a CD-ROM track that portrays, among other things, frescoes of the time, the instruments and the manuscript.

This is a superbly convincing performance, recorded with a nice full sound."

Classical good CD Guide 2002, Gramophone