Interview, The King's Singers on Wonderland

The King's Singers - perhaps the most beloved and successful vocal group in the world - continue to evolve after five and a half decades of musicmaking. Their most recent two albums both, in a way, look back to one of their most successful previous releases - Kids' Stuff, from the 1980s, has proved a fruitful source of inspiration in more ways than one.

The latter of these - Wonderland, released in September 2023 - takes the listener on a journey through the fantastical and the surreal, as well as at times venturing into the darker corners of the psyche. It's built around Ligeti's six formidably difficult Nonsense Madrigals, in which Lewis Carroll's eccentric words and worlds are never far away, and also features works by Ola Gjeilo, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, Judith Bingham, Joe Hisaishi and others. 

I caught up with two of the King's Singers - countertenor Patrick Dunachie and bass Jonathan Howard - to talk about the music on this album, the importance they attach to commissioning, and the way one piece in particular plays rather specifically on the individual personalities of the group's members!

Plenty of uncomplicated stories and heroes have undergone “gritty reboots” recently, so much so that it’s almost a cliché. Is this album the gritty reboot of Kids’ Stuff, in which the 1980s lineup of the King’s Singers presented a jolly selection of nursery rhymes?

PD: We did start a lot of conversations a couple of years ago from the idea of it being cool to make a sequel to Kids' Stuff, but that project actually wound up turning into our Disney album back in April. There were so many Disney songs and things of that nature that we were thinking could be included.

So Wonderland didn't come from that, but quite a lot of its energy has, in a sense, subconsciously soaked in from Kids' Stuff. And though yes, that was kind of a surface-level, what-you-see-is-what-you-get album, there is also a slightly surreal, eccentric quality to it, that's also present here. That's definitely something we were trying to capture, though certainly there's something more sinister about much of this repertoire.

JH: I certainly agree with all of that - and there are musical similarities between the Disney album and the original Kids' Stuff insofar as we've got famous composers like Nico Muhly and John Rutter writing for it, the same way people like Howard Goodall and others wrote for Kids' Stuff. It's a lovely entry-point into choral music for people who might not otherwise get there.

I was there will make plenty of listeners do a double-take: an unaccompanied choral work by Joe Hisaishi, of Studio Ghibli soundtrack fame. Where did the idea come from to commission something so different from him?

JH: I'll go first this time! One: He's a legend. Two: Our colleague Jules is half Japanese and so has got a great inroad into Japanese culture and the ripples that it has all over the world. Joe Hisaishi hadn't ever written anything for choir per se, but he has a minimalist, avant-garde streak in him which he loves to exercise. And it chimes very much with our mission of trying to bring worlds together, standing at the intersection of different cultural spaces.

A piece like I was there, responding to recent tragedies that have shaken the world, seems almost out of place among the somersaulting silliness of Ligeti’s effervescent madrigals. How does this work fit into the “Wonderland” theme?

PD: Wonderland operates on three levels. The title is partially there because lots of Ligeti's pieces were settings of Alice in Wonderland, and that's the centrepiece. Secondly, in most of the works, there's that sense of the weird and the wonderful and the surreal, and something folkloristic and magical. And thirdly, the term "wonderland" is also a descriptor for our library of commissioned works. We've got this treasure-trove of extraordinary pieces that are often quite unusual for the composer in question.

The topics that I was there talks about are all through the lens of memory, and there's this slightly mystical quality - particularly in the Japanese parts of the lyrics. A hazy memory and trauma, which for me does sit alongside the rest of it.

JH: Personally, when we were putting together the tracklisting for this album, I was guided by the idea of having the Ligetis as the backbone, fleshed out with great commissions from the last six decades. To me, it's not quite so on the nose as the Williamson Musicians of Bremen, which literally re-tells the folk story, but it works together in terms of the lengths and shapes of the works, and it provides a different soundworld.

PD: One more element is that the whole of Hisaishi's life and work has been fantasy-based. All the Studio Ghibli films are fantastical, and of course they're animated, so his whole oeuvre is based in that fantasy, mystical kind of universe.

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’s Alive, though musically much more upbeat than I was there, seems to come from a similar place - how did you first come across her work?

JH: She's a friend, a wonderful young composer and actress who's doing great things. This was her first professional composition for voices - a lot of what she does is writing for plays and films. I don't think it's meant to feel sinister, but I understand the reading of it as being a bit more dreamscape-y than some of the other tracks. In some ways it is indicative of the rest of her music, but just using voices. A lot of her music is very atmosphere-driven.

We perform the two pieces as companion-pieces quite often, partly because their lengths work; the Amewudah-Rivers, as a four-minute piece, acts as a sort of overture leading into something darker and more serious with I was there.

PD: One thing that does bring them together is that we asked them to just go away and write something that inspired them. And Francesca wrote the lyrics herself, while Joe got his daughter to write the lyrics for I was there.

You mention that Judith Bingham “interviewed” each of you individually, in order to cast you as the various mischievous deities in her Tricksters. Are you able to reveal why those roles ended up being distributed the way they did?

PD: I definitely remember that Coyote was spawned from the notion that Eddie has a naughty, silly streak to him. He's quite a straight-down-the-line guy generally speaking - he does our accounts - but he also has a slightly wacky, off-the-wall side to him, which I think sparked Coyote. Johnny, why do you think you got Kwaku Anansa?

JH: I think it was a lot to do with limbyness - a spider having eight legs, and me being so tall and gangly. So with that shapeshifting spider god there was that sense.

PD: And for Jules, it was the Moon Hare. It’s a deity in lots of Asian cultures, and when we were talking to Judith in the process of her preparing the piece, Jules mentioned to her that aspect of his heritage - feeling very British but also very Asian - and so that was the reason for that.

Nick Ashby being Loki is something that I was trying to get my head round...

JH: I can certainly get you being the Earthmaker, with a stateliness and balance that maybe some of us don't quite have?

PD: Interesting...!

JH: At one stage there were going to be six deities rather than five, and Christopher Bruerton was going to have been a Māori trickster god; a lot of his traits are very comic in nature. Slightly blustering, slightly tardy...

PD: There was also I think a voice-part element to it. Gaia, for instance, being part of the inspiration for the Earthmaker character - so traditionally a female god. So that high floating voice with the connotations of water that open the piece made sense. In the same way, realistically Loki has to be a baritone, and perhaps something more sinister and bassy for the spider god.

JH: The funny thing is that this is a commission that Judith wrote in 1971, aged 21, as her first professional commission ever, and by her own admission she delivered it late and it was unsingable. And when we approached her about wanting to work with her, she mentioned that she had this work. It's now completely reworked and I don't think much of the original is still in there, but it's interesting that she looked back at it and saw the germ of something, even from half a century's distance.

PD: She's re-potted it.

JH: Yes, and in a way that honours the group’s current membership. The reason I mention it is that as Pat said earlier, one of the things that we did with these three newest commissions was to allow them the autonomy to write what they wanted to write - which is often when composers produce their best work. And this is what emerged; she felt motivated to bring that original piece to life in some way.

One thing that binds everything on this album together is that every work included is a commission by the King’s Singers. It’s clearly important to you to support composers; can you tell us anything about future commissioning plans?

JH: Can I check something?

[conspiratorial whispering between Johnny and Patrick]

PD: I don't think we can say that.

JH: OK, I think what we can definitely say is that there are projects that are happening!

PD: A politician's answer.

JH: And these include a collaboration with a percussionist, for which there are new works being written which will sit alongside works that have already been written historically - four Street Songs written by Steve Martland for us and Evelyn Glennie about thirty years ago, which are being revived by us with a different percussionist and with new works by different composers. I don't think I'm allowed to say more on that...

We have our sixtieth anniversary coming up in 2028, which I know feels a long way away at the end of 2023, but the planning has to start quite early.

One of the things that historically the King's Singers have loved is the works that have been written for us and orchestra. These have often used a smaller chamber orchestras - or they're huge, like the one by James MacMillan called The Quickening, which was originally for the Hilliard Ensemble but has now been adapted to be a King's-Singers-plus-orchestra piece. It's incredible, but it's with children's choir and full symphony chorus...

PD: Tam-tam, organ...

JH: And sixteen brake drums in the orchestra. It's not very performable. So one of the things that we're working out at the moment what the next King's Singers orchestral piece will be; that will hopefully be in the offing before too long.

PD: Out of interest, if you could nominate someone to be commissioned by us, who would you say?

I would want to say someone like Philip Glass, Steve Reich - even Arvo Pärt?

JH: The closest thing we've got to a commission from Arvo Pärt is a choral work that he wrote for a girls' choir called Zwei Beter, which is the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector, and together we reworked that for the six of us - so we're the only people in the world with that version of it.

PD: Which we'll premiere in September. But I suspect that Philip Glass and Steve Reich have waiting-lists for the next two hundred years.

JH: It's interesting, actually - when we first listened to the Hisaishi we felt it took us close to a Steve Reich-y soundworld.

PD: We've just done quite a lot of commissioning - for the Disney album we commissioned twenty-two new arrangements from scratch. And we also commissioned the Gjeilo, the Hisaishi, the Amewudah-Rivers, the Bingham, and before that a piece of Freya Waley-Cohen; James MacMillan wrote something for our Byrd and Weelkes album Tom and Will, as did Roderick Williams. So we've come out of a period of incredible commissioning productivity, and I think maybe this is a quieter patch while we build towards the sixtieth.

The other thing I wanted to say - and I'm not sure this story has ever been printed anywhere! - is that back when the group was preparing its tenth anniversary, they got in touch with Olivier Messiaen and said they'd like to commission a piece from him. And he replied saying that his waiting list was five years and after that he'd be able to get something to them. And Al Hume replied saying that he didn't think the group would still be around in five years but many thanks all the same!

And now we're here, fifty-five years later, thinking why oh why didn't we get a piece by Messiaen? It would have been amazing. Something like O sacrum convivium but with even denser harmony, maybe.

JH: So now, when a composer says "I'll do it, but in six years’ time", we say "that's fine, do it!"