Accentus Accentus, an award-winning French a capella vocal group, will perform at UCLA's Schoenberg Hall Thursday night in its North American debut.
By Michael Rosen-Molina
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Over the years, the walls of Schoenberg Hall have reverberated with the sounds of innumerable instruments from myriad concerts.
Now Schoenberg will host another concert but the instruments will remain silent. Celebrated French a cappella group Accentus will make its U.S. debut at Schoenberg Hall on Nov. 2.
The ensemble is the brainchild of Artistic Director Laurence Equilbey, who formed the group after studying a cappella music abroad. Since its creation in 1991, Accentus has sought to bring recognition to the often overlooked field of pure vocal music.
“What appeals to me in a cappella is the purity of the sound, the homogeneity of the material,” Equilbey said.
A cappella is vocal music that relies entirely on the strength of the singers’ voices, without instrumental accompaniment.
Accentus specializes in music of the 19th and 20th centuries. Instrumental works dominated the music scene prior to the turn of the 18th century, so it is only within the last 200 years that a cappella music has come into its own as an art form.
IMG Artists Laurence Equilbey is the artistic director for Accentus, the celebrated French a cappella group. Accentus’ work in this genre earned the group the 1995 Liliane Bettencourt Award, bestowed upon it by the Academie des Beaux Arts, and the “Musical Personality of the Year 1997-98” title, from the Syndicat Professionnel de la Critique Dramatique, among other distinctions.
A cappella differs from other music not only in its lack of instrumental accompaniment but also in the difficulty to achieve uniformity of its sound.
“It’s a unique way of expression performed,” Equilbey said. “It’s fantastic, you get a purity of intonation, of rightness, and the timbres of the voices create a very liquid, acoustic quality. When it works, the feeling is quite physical.”
Named after a Latin musical term, Accentus refers to a composition technique from medieval Gregorian chants; specifically, a tonic accent, used to raise the melody.
“We wanted to suggest an idea of energy, of elevation, and of mystical exploration,” Equilbey said.
Prior to founding Accentus, Equilbey studied at the Paris and Vienna Conservatories. While in Vienna, Equilbey performed with the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, an experience that inspired her to form Accentus.
“I sang a lot in the Arnold Schoenberg choir ensemble and I thought that we lacked such an ensemble in France,” Equilbey said.
“Especially for pieces from Poulenc, like ‘La Messe en sol Majeur,’ which is the most celebrated French piece abroad, and no ensembles in France performed these great pieces of work,” she continued.
Equilbey was disturbed by the neglect that a cappella suffered in her native France.
“It was not a French tradition because people didn’t know of it,” she said. “In France now, there’s a rebirth of interest for this vocal art, in part because of us and other ensembles.”
“We are the only ensemble using 32 professional singers who perform this repertoire,” Equilbey continued. “We helped rekindle public interest in those pieces.”
Historically, a cappella music has not been associated with France, despite the art form’s popularity in France’s closest neighbors.
“For historic reasons, the French had forgotten this repertoire, and now, with the European unification, we are catching up with the German and Scandinavian repertoires,” Equilbey said. “This was something that we couldn’t hear in France.”
The Schoenberg program includes Francis Poulenc’s, “Motets pour uns Temps de Penitence” and “Un Soir de Neige Figure Humaine,” Pascal Dusapin’s “Granum Sinapis,” and Arnold Schoenberg’s “Priede auf Erden.”
“I picked those pieces because I’d like to take a stand for the contemporary work,” Equilbey said.
Although all the pieces are widely regarded by music scholars as modern classics, “Granum Sinapis” is noteworthy as a piece only recently completed in 1997.
Started in 1992, Dusapin began work on the composition after discovering inspiration in a late medieval philosophical text by Rhenish theologian Master Eckhart. Dusapin used Eckhart’s writing as the basis for a choral work commenting on man’s quest for the infinite. Equilbey and Accentus became the first choir to publicly perform “Granum Sinapis” in September 1998, and has continued to perform the piece in concerts since.
“It was very moving because it’s very new to have French composers writing a cappella, and it was thrilling to deliver a piece for the first time,” Equilbey said.
Not given to static repetition, Accentus has continued to modify their treatment of the composition in subsequent concerts.
“While we were working on it, it got more refined,” Equilbey said. “It got more subtle, more colorful, we shaped the phrasing, the balances, and now it’s a cycle that we handle better than we did at the first performance.”
Equilbey anticipates audiences will react to Accentus’ music just as well on this side of the Atlantic as they do in Europe.
“I would expect the audience to leave the theater with the feeling of fusion with the work,” said Equilbey. “A feeling of beauty of sound, of emotion, of color.”
MUSIC: Accentus performs at Schoenberg Hall on Nov. 2, at 8 p.m. For ticketing information, contact the Central Ticket office at (310) 825-2101.