Recent Press
The Art of memory: Benjamin Bagby sings Beowulf
Everywhere around me leaving two great concerts at Tanglewood this week, the talk was of those phenoms of memory, Benjamin Bagby and Pieter Wispelwey. Mr. Bagby spoke, sang, and roared Beowulf...
Mr. Bagby gave a concentrated performance that flowed out naturally. This was especially remarkable because the sounds he made ranged all the way from yelps and groans to finely judged singing, with everything in between. He moved among all of these vocalizations with cohesion. By the end I heard his human voice as something different, something more capacious and full of surprise, something that took the ear almost like a phrase of Mozart's, quick to change and alter. He showed me something about the epic style, the bellicose tale of conquest and defeat. Lists of arms, for example, were trumpeted out, like the finale of the narration they followed. This made sense. The heavy but somehow jumping rhythms of the Anglo-Saxon propelled the flow of sounds various and arresting. Bagby made me understand how Odysseus, loved by the young Nausicaa, could have wept as the Cretan bard sang of fallen Troy, thus betraying himself and saved at the end only with the help of his young lover, never to see her more.
— by Keith Kibler, Berkshire Review for the Arts, July 2010
Beowulf, sung and recited by Benjamin Bagby at Tanglewood
Seiji Ozawa Hall, Thursday, July 22, 2010
Benjamin Bagby has been performing Beowulf now for twenty years, usually to sold-out houses, especially in New York City. (I’ve tried and failed to get tickets more than once.) Audiences and critics rave about Bagby’s ability to create a spellbinding effect in his recitation/singing over the hour and forty minutes of its duration — all in what is practically a foreign language, even if most people call it Old English. With brilliant success, Bagby has transformed what was once the bane of American English majors — all too long ago: that last of those required to address the older stages of our language are hoary of head and halting in gait — into a thrilling entertainment full of color and expression. It is as if the early music movement had finally spawned their Stokowski. The effect is so essentially baroque. What Lear or Hamlet has speech, declamation, and singing in his dramatic quiver? In this way Bagby has bridged the language gap and made it possible for modern audiences to share something like the enjoyment a medieval scop’s audience would have experienced in a bardic performance. Of course today we sit decorously in Seiji Ozawa Hall or some place like it, and there is no mead or beer at hand. On the rare occasion that a line comes out as comprehensible modern English, we laugh. Our eyes flit back and forth to and from the supertitles...
As powerful and fascinating as the performance is, a distance remains, evident on a more profound level in the almost caricatural way Bagby conveys the heavy, northern Germanic sarcasm of Hrothgar’s response to Beowulf’s self-introduction. The rationale behind this comes from Bagby the performer rather than Bagby the scholar. Here exaggeration is necessary: otherwise modern audiences wouldn’t get it. By contrast the mystery and horror of Grendel’s visitations communicate directly to us. For this Bagby needs no more than the storyteller’s poise and expression, at the very least a rich and highly seasoned brew...
f not every student of Beowulf has found this primal voice, Bagby certainly has, and, as an artist, he is able to re-create it with his voice and fingers, not to mention other parts of his body, like his feet, which he taps and stamps on occasion. The enormity of sound produced in the famous opening word of the poem, Hwaet! (Listen!), always a strong word whenever it recurs, lets us know that this will be a performance on a very large scale, true to the concept of epic. Bagby shapes each meaningful narrative unit, whether it is a basic half-line, or two or three. This expressive attention to detail makes the verse — and the story — intensely vivid to all but the least interested in the audience, even if they don’t know the poem at all and are struggling along with the supertitles — or at least I imagine so. He combines this with a fine sense of timing and narrative shape, so that the narrative succeeds in musical and dramatic terms as well. And then there is his robust and infectious sense of humor!
From the uproarious applause of the audience, I imagine that many of its members will come back to hear Benjamin Bagby sing Beowulf again. I have already acquired the DVD of his performance together with some invaluable interviews and discussions. His performance is overwhelmingly captivating, but I do recommend a little preparation for full access to its wonders. If you, first example get hold of an introductory book, like Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), also available online as The Electronic Introduction to Old English, and learn to pronounce Old English and come to understand the meter, so that you can read a few lines aloud, it will open up even more of the pleasures contained in the performance. Benjamin Bagby will take care of the rest.
— by Michael Miller, Berkshire Review for the Arts, 31 July 2010
… highly impressive… Bagby captured the essence of an early medieval reading of the work… displayed a resonant voice and particularly fine text declamation. He also played a simple hand-held six string harp that provided a melodic and harmonic backdrop over which the epic unfolded…a soft but beautiful and effective sound.
Most remarkable from the evening was Bagby's expression and acting. Utilizing facial gestures, aspirants, vocal swoops, whispers, and an occasional thud, he successfully provided an intensity of sound and sight to underscore the vivid word pictures provided in the text…audience members [were kept] on the edge of their seats.
— Kansas City Star, 01 March 2009
A Thrilling Musical Journey Back in Time
New York, The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art
… the experience of hearing Benjamin Bagby perform Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, was absolutely unique… He drew us from our world of the written word back into the world of tribal society and Anglo-Saxon legend, when bards, called scops, told stories in song and speech to spellbound listeners, using only voice, gesture, and the simplest musical accompaniment.
And he did this at the Cloisters…What setting could have been more fitting?
Bagby’s uncanny ability to bring to life the characters and events of the story was so powerful that the written text seemed more like a distraction. It would seem that he had so few resources -- dressed in black, seated on a stool, strumming a six string lyre, and singing and reciting in a language that was utterly unintelligible to a 21st century English speaker. In fact, with his beautiful, deep baritone voice, his extraordinarily expressive face, the gestures of his one free hand, …he showed that he had resources aplenty.
To experience this mesmerizing performance for yourself, I strongly suggest that you visit Mr. Bagby’s website.
— www.ConcertoNet.com (Arlene Judith Klotzko), 08 March 2009
From Benjamin Bagby’s performances of 'Beowulf' at the Edinburgh International Festival (August, 2007)
"…but when Benjamin Bagby speaks it is as if a thousand years have disappeared. I was sceptical about the pleasures of hearing 100 minutes of this ancient epic told in the original Anglo-Saxon with English surtitles. But something odd happens as Bagby begins to speak, chewing on some words as if they are meat or gristle, launching others like mournful songs. Suddenly you are caught up in the hypnotic rhythms of the story.
…this evening is a triumphant demonstration of the power of storytelling and our deep-seated need to share stories.
Part of the evening's power is that it suggests the concerns and characteristics of humans have not changed all that much.
I can't help feeling that the tale would be much better enjoyed around a roaring fire in a pub, but Bagby nonetheless holds you gripped, and his story seems urgently alive."
— Guardian Unlimited (Manchester), August 20, 2007
"Benjamin Bagby is an extraordinary performer who provides an extraordinary evening's entertainment. Glazed in candlelight and accompanied by his six-string harp, he recreates the role of the scop, a mediaeval storyteller who could perform epics of up to six hours long or more for the entertainment of the town. The tale is told in its original guttural and rich sounds, and often Bagby breaks into a hybrid of song and recitation. The harp flutters around its six notes whipping up suspense and lulling pensively around the words, in an altogether entrancing combination. Aside from the feat which Bagby achieves in memorising the archaic rhythms and unfamiliar sounds of the language, he is a captivating storyteller who moulds each word like a carefully carved stone."
— The British Theatre Guide (London), August, 2007
"Yet the truth is that Bagby's performance repays close attention with such a rich series of echoes and resonances that it's impossible, by the end of the evening, to avoid the feeling that this is a vital, if ancient, piece of popular entertainment, rich in everyday wisdom, thrilling acts of violence, sensational narrative power, and the kind of flexible, shifting relationship between words and music associated today with genres such as rap and hip-hop.
… there's no escaping the sense that this great poem is one of the historic cornerstones of our culture, as rich as any of the other great myths in this year's Festival programme in its sense of humankind struggling for survival in a capricious or indifferent universe.
And Bagby's performance is not only a technical tour de force, but a shining labour of love for the great story it tells, and for the original sound of its telling. "
— The Scotsman (Edinburgh), 21 Aug 2007
"…It even took place in a kind of baronial hall, candlelit, and packed the night I was there with more people than I thought there were in the entire British Isles dying to listen to an hour of what is, essentially, foreign poetry.
They were in for a treat. Bagby brings the story of Beowulf’s slaying of the monster, Grendel, vividly alive, sometimes singing, sometimes declaiming, sometimes taking on the character of whoever is speaking. He’s a crack storyteller.
…a magical evening where poetry’s musicality resounds in a way few of us get to hear now."
— The Sunday Times (London), 26 August 2007