'Morning Star' - The Gesualdo Six, 20 December 2024

Wigmore Hall

Palestrina (arr. Willcocks): Matin Responsory
Lassus: Conditor alme siderum
Praetorius: Nun, komm der Heiden Heiland a 6
Sally Beamish: In the stillness
Jacobus Händl: Mirabile mysterium
Cheryl Frances-Hoad: The Promised Light of Life
Plainchant: Rorate coeli
Byrd: Rorate coeli
Poulenc: O magnum mysterium
Anon (arr. Praetorius): Es ist ein Ros entsprungen
Anon: Angelus ed virginem
Plainchant: Ecce advenit
Cornelius: Weihnachtslieder, op.8: no.3, ‘Die Könige’
Eccard: Maria wallt zum Heiligtum
Clemens non Papa: Magi veniunt
Arvo Pärt: Morning Star
Judith Bingham: In Mary’s love
Plainchant: Vidimus stellam
Lassus: Tribus miraculis
Owain Park: O send out thy light
Bob Chilcott: The Shepherd’s Carol


Alasdair Austin, Guy James (countertenors)
Josh Cooter (tenor)
Joseph Wicks (tenor)
Michael Craddock (baritone)
Owain Park (artistic director, bass)

The eve of the shortest day of 2024 was especially miserable in London: cold, wet, and dark. All the more need, then, for an aural glimpse of the ‘Morning Star’ that gave its name to this Wigmore Hall concert from The Gesualdo Six. Rather than concentrate on Advent, Christmas, or Epiphany, the programme took us from one through another to the third. Indeed, it perhaps tried to do too much in too many pieces, a succession of very different, generally short music in some cases more merging into one than showing affinity and connection, though there were certainly exceptions to that. A packed audience, though, clearly enjoyed its evening, nowhere more so than in an encore performance of Jingle Bells, arranged by Gordon Langford. ‘Style’ might seem an unduly pretentious attribute, but for me it pointed out what had sometimes been missing elsewhere, certain standout pieces offering welcome relief. Perhaps a church acoustic would have imparted a warmer blend, or perhaps I was simply not in the right mood, but there were times – and I realise this is a matter of taste more than anything else – when relief in the guise of female voices might have helped. 

I had reservations, then, but this was also an opportunity to hear a good range of repertoire from chant to Palestrina to the present day, in the guise of artistic director Owain Park’s own O send out thy light, gratefully written for the group, in which instance they were clearly very much at home. Palestrina had appeared at the opening, in the guise of David Willcocks’s well-known arrangement of a Nunc dimittis as a Mattins responsory. Many will surely have recognised it in one guise or another, and it made for a fitting opening, followed by well if slightly anonymously sung Lassus (how I felt about a later example too) and more florid Praetorius, Nun komm der Heiland, which to my ears gave a more arresting impression. Plainchant and ‘Anon.’ often fared best, I think, deceptive simplicity permitting performances and their reception to hone in on melody and words, the mediaeval carol Angelus ad virginem gathering voices in a warm conclusion to the first half. 

Other highlights for me included the extraordinary wandering chromatic lines of Jacobus Händl’s Mirabile mysterium. They are anything but easy to sing, yet intonation never proved a problem. Nor did it in Poulenc’s O magnum mysterium, which emerged a little later as fitting complement in stillness and movement, although this was one of those cases when I felt the loss of women’s (or even children’s) voices. The expressive accomplishment of Byrd’s Rorate coeli was highly welcome, perhaps a first-half counterpart to the second-half highpoint of Clemens non Papa’s euphonious and, no coincidence, more extended Ephipany Magi veniunt. It was preceded by Joannes Eccard’s Maria wallt zum Heiligtum which likewise benefited from a degree more warmth. 

None of the twenty-first-century pieces seemed concerned with straining at the edges of modernity, Sally Beamish’s In the stillness purposefully reticent, almost belying the skill with which verbal and musical cadences coincided. Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Judith Bingham ventured further harmonically, the former a rare if doubtless coincidental instance of seeming to take its leave from its predecessor (Händl), the latter another welcome case of painting on a slightly larger canvas, which if not exactly ‘Romantic’ was not exactly un-Romantic either. Arvo Pärt’s Morning Star, well crafted and performed with sympathy, readily laid bare idea and processes. A somewhat dour Cornelius ‘Three Kings’, sung in English, suggested that the nineteenth century was in generally better avoided; unless, that is, we count Jingle Bells.

 

Tally of concerts heard in 2023

Mozart exchanged second operatic place for first in 2023 concerts. Perhaps no great surprises, save for Byrd's high-placed anniversary showing. (I should be very happy for it to be repeated in other years.) The world's bizarre neglect of the Second Viennese School, even Berg, shows no sign of being reversed, though surely 2024's Schoenberg anniversary will bring some temporary respite.

As usual, I have counted one appearance or twenty in a concert as one. That has its problems, but I am not sure counting every piece, even if it were practical, would be any better. Encores are not included. I have endeavoured to remember performances I attended but did not review, but it is of course possible I may have missed something.

11 Mozart

8 Beethoven

7 Brahms, Schumann

6 Bach

5 Schubert, Byrd

4 Mahler, Prokofiev, Strauss

3 Benjamin, Chopin, Ligeti, Liszt, Ravel

2 Debussy, Haydn, Knussen

1 Alkan, Dieter Ammann, CPE Bach, Johann Christoph Bach, JCF Bach, Bartók, Beethoven, Berberian, Berg, Berio, Boismortier, Boulez, Busoni, Cage, Chausson, Unsuk Chin, Coleridge-Taylor, Crumb, Duparc, Dvořák, Elgar, Fauré, Francesco Filidei, Grisey, Saed Haddad, Hartmann, Henze, Hindemith, Holliger, Ibert, Kurtág, Márton Illés, Jolas, Sigurd von Koch, Lachenmann, Manoury, Messiaen, Mompou, Elizabeth Ogonek, Poulenc, Rachmaninov, Reger, Reimann, Saint-Saëns, Scarlatti, Schmidt, Schoeck, Schnittke, Schoenberg, Schulhoff, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Scriabin, Sweelinck, Telemann, Tippett, Ustolvskaja, Varèse, Vivaldi, Wagner, Weelkes, Weill, Widmann, Wolf, Xenakis, Zimmermann

The Cardinall's Musick/Carwood - Byrd, 4 July 2023

Wigmore Hall

Mass for 4 voices, with the Propers for the Feast of Easter Day
Mass for 3 voices, with the Propers for the Feast of Corpus Christi
Mass for 5 voices, with the Propers for the Feast of All Saints

The Cardinall’s Musick

Andrew Carwood (director)

  

On 4 July 1623, William Byrd’s long, turbulent life ended in the Essex village of Stondon Massey, to which he had semi-retired almost thirty years earlier. Four hundred years later, the Wigmore Hall and The Cardinall’s Musick commemorated that death with performances of the three mass settings he wrote for private, recusant performance during that ‘retirement’, as published in three pamphlets printed by Thomas East between 1592 and 1595, supplemented by polyphonic settings of seasonal Propers from the two books of Gradualia (1605 and 1607). Knowing that these were probably the first English mass settings composed since the 1550s only added to the sense of something special, secret, and possibly dangerous (or rather, it would have been). Three concerts spaced throughout the day offered a fitting tribute to one of England’s greatest composers, enhanced by exemplary programme notes from Katherine Butler. 

The order was that of publication, so we began with the Mass for 4 voices. Certain parameters for performance were set up, the masses sometimes using two voices per part, reducing to one for certain sections, naturally the more intimate, and the other music given one to a part (though not necessarily in the same number of parts as the mass). But this first performance was also atypical, in that it was the only one to feature only male voices, female sopranos being employed for the other two. The sound of one or two countertenors on the top line can take a little getting used to; so can a concert hall acoustic for sacred music. (I had ringing in my mind the different style and venue of Stile Antico at the Temple Church a few days previously, and ‘Haec dies’ made for an interesting point of comparison, here sounding notably less ‘Anglican’.) But hearing things differently is part of the interest—and here not only the opportunity to hear the complete mass settings and in something of a liturgical reconstruction (albeit only musically) was in itself part of the attraction and achievement. Speeds tended to be on the swift side, but then this was – in theory – Easter, not Lent, as the Introit, ‘Resurrexit, et adhuc tecum sum’ made clear. And the Sanctus would broaden notably. The singers, throughout thoughtfully and ably directed by Andrew Carwood, certainly seemed to have found their own solution, as in the notably progressive three stages of the Kyrie, to the riddle of how to have the music sound both straightforward and complex. Words were always clear: crucial where there were many of them, not only in the Gloria and Credo, but also the Sequence, ‘Victimae paschali’. Detail was taken care of, as in the Offertory Terra remiuit et quievit’ and its earth trembling, without undue fuss. A full, flowing Agnus Dei nonetheless kept a sense of space, followed, as were all three settings, by the chanted ‘Ite missa est. Deo gratias.’ 

The move to three parts was  postponed by a four-part Introit, ‘Cibavit eos ex adipe frumenti’, its Alleluias an especial joy. The almost-miniature quality of the Mass in 3 parts was not in any sense taken to convey a lack of ambition, but rather an intimacy that offered its own challenges and rewards. Informers, after all, were everywhere; special care was often necessary. The three simple statements of the Kyrie were complete in themselves; they required no more. And a similar straightforwardness to the Gloria left plenty of room for winning detail—and an unmistakable sense of religious confidence. This was, after all, the celebration of Corpus Christi, Byrd’s comfort and relish in setting the words of the Propers strongly to the fore: ‘Alleluia, Caro mea vere est cibus,’ for instance, in the Gradual and Alleluia. Credal word painting made its point beautifully, as for instance on ‘ascendit’. There was no doubting, here or elsewhere, that this meant something: something extremely important. The Offertory, ‘Sacerdotes Domini’, illuminated from within and without a darkened world. So did the radiant certainty of the Communion setting, ‘Quotiescunque manducabitis panem hunc…’, the Agnus Dei seemingly taking its leave from and also completing it.

For the Mass in 5 parts, we had the full complement of ten singers (plus conductor). Five solo voices, though, could sound every bit as jubilatory, indeed still more so, as in the festal opening, vocal bells pealing: ‘Gaudeamus omnes’. The music of the Mass sounded warmer, more majestic, than that of the four-part version. There was strength to the more intimate duets and trios too. This was not Monteverdi and would never have been taken as such, but perhaps there was an affinity at distance after all, whatever the privations of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England for a devout Roman Catholic. Byrd’s boldness in imitative writing in the Gradual and Alleluia – the word of refreshment, ‘reficiam’, in particular – received powerful advocacy. So too did the declamatory writing of the Credo, sometimes tending a little toward the madrigalian, whilst ever founded on the truth of the Church as Rock of Peter. The Offertory ‘Justorum animae in manu Dei sunt’ afforded, so it seemed, a foretaste of sweet riches in the world to come, Byrd’s writing well balanced and harmonically grounded in performance. The extraordinary string of unprepared dissonances in the Communion motet, ‘Beati mundo corde’ made its point, from a world of persecution, abundantly clear, after which the solo petitioning of the Agnus Dei took on new and wider meaning, albeit ultimately reconciled by a peace that passed, as it must, all understanding.

Fretwork - Byrd and Weelkes, 30 June 2023

Temple Church

Byrd: Pavan and Gaillard; Fantasy in 6 parts; Three Fantasies in 3 parts; Fantasy in four parts; Five-Part Pavan; Browning; Two In Nomines in 5 parts
Weelkes: In Nomine in 5 parts
Byrd: Prelude and Ground; Fantasy: two parts in one the fourth above
Weelkes: Fantasy in six parts
Byrd: Fantasy in six parts

Temple Music’s William Byrd Festival continued with music for viol consort: mostly Byrd, but with a couple of pieces by Thomas Weelkes. The twin variety and unity of Byrd’s contributions was striking, in some cases gradually permitting the emergence of older themes, whether from folk music or, in the case of the In nomines, a cantus firmus from John Taverner’s Missa gloria tibi trinitas. A programme equally well constructed and well performed, with subtle yet undeniable mastery, offered a restorative lunchtime hour in the heart of legal London. 

A pair of dances, a Pavan and Gaillard, made for an inviting opening, typical of Byrd’s deft combination here of depth and lightness of touch, the second dance related, consequent, yet also quite different, quicker and livelier, though never rushed. Three three-part fantasias followed, shared between the six players. The textural difference was obvious, but they were also softer in mood, especially the first, since there was once more considerable variation to be heard in work and performance. The Fantasy in four parts was wistful, though never morose; always, it moved, beguiled, and enriched, a twin emotional and intellectual treat. A Five-part Pavan seemed at its opening – however sentimental it may be to say so – to reach forward, via William Lawes and Matthew Locke, to the final flowering of English consort music in Purcell. Not that it was not characteristic, but future potentiality also seemed present. Ever dancing, it was equally ever changing. Browning, overtly based on a folk song, proved as variegated as it was catchy. 

A fine pairing of In Nomines followed: the first intimate, yet powerfully, even searingly dissonant; the second offering both complement and contrast. Weelkes’s contribution also had its dissonance, voiced in a different, yet related voice, almost as if it and its predecessor had formed part of a series with the first. The ensemble still numbering five, Byrd’s Prelude and Ground brought another element of contrapuntal technique and expression to the fore, as throughout enlivening rather than didactic, illustrative of a seemingly endless capacity for variation. The fantasia two parts in one the fourth above sounded as if an exemplar of Byrd and his players’ ability to shape a work with mastery and apparent effortlessness so as to sound ‘natural’ in conception: full of incident, yet with an unquestionable sense and shape of the whole. 

To conclude, we returned to six-part fantasias by both composers, Byrd’s surely the deeper of the two. Its entire passage, of increasing metrical variety, emerged as if founded on the presence of something darkly melancholic, part acknowledged and part shrouded in mystery: perhaps not the worst metaphor for the concert as a whole.

Stile Antico - ‘England’s Nightingale’: Byrd, Morley, Philips, and Tomkins, 29 June 2023

Temple Church

Byrd: Emendemus in melius
Byrd: O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth; Sing joyfully; ‘Great Service’: Nunc Dimittis
Byrd: Vide Domine afflictionem nostram; Haec dies quam fecit Dominum; Ne irascaris, Domine
Byrd: Retire my soul; Ave verum corpus; Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes; Optimam partem elegit; Factus est repente; Mass for Four Voices: ‘Agnus Dei’
Morley: Domine, Dominus noster
Philips: Ecce vicit Leo
Tomkins: Too much I once lamented
Byrd: Laudibus in sanctis

Temple Music’s William Byrd Festival, commemorating the 400^th anniversary of the composer’s death, offers two lectures, three services, and four concerts. Prior commitments mean I have had to restrict myself to two of the concerts, but if the rest is anything like this opening event from Stile Antico, listeners would be well advised to flock to the Temple Church now. Bookended by two Latin motes from the Cantiones sacrae (1575 and 1589 incarnations), the rest of the programme took a broadly thematic tour through Byrd’s life and career, offering four sets: ‘“A good egg” – Byrd, the loyal subject,’ ‘“The caged bird” – Byrd, the Catholic at court,’ ‘“A country nest” – Byrd the Essex Gentleman,’ and finally ‘“Under his wing” – Byrd the “much reverenced master”.’ 

The opening Emendemus in Melius made for a splendid concert introit, Stile Antico’s sound warm and rounded, doubtless assisted further by the Temple acoustic—and, of course, by Byrd’s music itself. Indeed, it was difficult not to believe whilst listening that any composer, even Bach or Mozart, could offer a more excellent balance between harmony, counterpoint, and momentum. Inner points, subtly yet tellingly prominent, proved a thing of wonder in themselves. 

A more overtly Anglican – at least to us, if the anachronism might be forgiven – Byrd was to be heard in the following three pieces. O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth has additional resonances for us, of course, not least in the wake of last year’s departure of the second Elizabeth. It received a fine performance here, again of considerable warmth, with finely judged dissonances, none of which eclipsed a proper sense of direction. Sing joyfully, coming from three decades later in the 1590s, reprised for the baptism of James I’s daughter Mary in 1605, had a smaller ensemble of six solo voices: animated and, yes, joyful, it was finely, not fussily, shaded, for instance on the psalmist’s exhortation to ‘blow the trumpet in the new moon’. The other ensemble members returned for a Nunc dimittis from the ‘Great Service’ with an apt sense of eventide peace, a ravishing surge of light for ‘thy people Israel’, and a warmly enveloping doxology. 

Three Latin motets from the Cantiones sacrae followed: works not for public worship, but private devotion (and connoisseurship). Vide, Domine, afflictionem nostrum and Ne iracaris, Domine, both implicitly comparing the fallen Jerusalem to the condition of the Roman Catholic Church, brought with them a sense of weight, even grief, balancing the latter with not a little defiance. The latter, dark, plaintive, yet illuminated, managed to inform our own very different current causes for grief more than four centuries later, its astonishing harmonies biting as if yesterday, yet never for their own sake, as one might hear in, say, Gesualdo. ‘Expression’ may mean something different today, but one could persuade oneself – Byrd, even, could persuade one – that it was close enough. In between, the Easter Haec dies quam fecit Dominus was relished for its madrigalian style and contrasting brightness of mood and message.

Following the interval, we moved to Byrd’s later years and to music probably written for recusant performance in the Catholic chapel of Byrd’s patron Sir John Petre in Stondon Massey, Essex. To quote Andrew Griffiths’s programme note, ‘The music of Gradualia,’ Byrd’s complete cycle of music for Catholic feasts, ‘could hardly be more different to the Cantiones motets. It radiates confidence...’ First, though, and from a distance, we heard the elegiac Retire my soul, Byrd setting his own words of final reckoning, from his final publication of 1611, the Psalms, Songs and Sonnets. Distance certainly lent enchantment here, not that that was lacking in what followed either. The Ave verum corpus, with its celebrated calls of ‘miserere mei’, their dissonances, and their resolution received a performance both rich and sad, as did the Agnus Dei from the Mass for Four Voices at the other end, its patient unfolding especially fulfilling. In between came a well-judged contrast of praise in the Laudate dominum, a sweet fruit of intimate Marian devotion, Optimam partem eligit, and a breath of fresh, Pentecostal air, replete with animating, transformative joy in the brief span of Factus est repente.  

Music from the next generation brought, as one might expect, both affinity and contrast. Thomas Morley’s Domine, Dominus noster the work of a young composer strongly influenced by the older master, though surely in the line of other English composers too. Its method of unfolding and its dissonances marked the former. Peter Philips’s Ecce vicit Leo showed a Roman Catholic escaped to more favourable Continental climes, its Italianate style very different. Thomas Tomkins’s madrigal, Too much I once lamented, made for a subtle tribute from a small consort (just five voices). The final Byrd Laudibus in sanctis proved a rich, many-voiced song of praise, letting, as its text has it, the ‘harmonious psalteries with fine string sing of Him, … the joyful dance praise Him with nimble foot.’ As an encore, Thomas Weelkes’s Hosanna to the Son of David recognised another fine English composer deceased in 1623.

'Musick's Monument' - Crowe/Fretwork - Byrd, Gibbons, and Purcell, 7 October 2021

Wigmore Hall

Byrd: Prelude and Ground a 5: ‘The Queen’s Goodnight’
O Lord, how vain
Fantasia a 5: ‘Two parts in one the fourth above’
O that most rare breast
Gibbons: Two Fantasias of 3 parts
Now each flowery bank of May
Byrd: My mistress had a little dog

Purcell: Two Fantazias in 4 parts
O solitude, my sweetest choice, Z406
Gibbons: Two In Nomines
Faire is the rose
Purcell: Two Fantazias in 4 parts
Oedipus, King of Thebes: ‘Music for a while’
The Fairy Queen: ‘When I have often heard young maids complaining’

Lucy Crowe (soprano)
Fretwork (Richard Boothby, Asako Morikawa, Sam Stadlen, Emily Ashton, Joanna Levine)

Thomas Mace’s Musick’s Monument, or, A remembrance of the best practical musick, both divine and civil, that has ever been known to have been in the world divided into three parts, looked back wistfully at an age of English music almost passed. Conservative, even reactionary, Mace detested new-fangled French influences on the musical culture of his own time. He disliked ‘Squaling-Scoulding-Fiddles’, to be used only if balanced by ‘Lusty Full-Sciz’d Theorbos’, and, as favoured sacred music from the age of William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, elevated music for viol consort, consort songs included, over newer styles and genres. If most of Henry Purcell’s music stood very much in the latter vein, Purcell, in his celebrated Fantazias of 1780, also paid tribute to the golden age of the consort, showing beyond doubt that a composer could be master of both. It was a farewell, though, however masterly—and probably ignored. They went unpublished until 1927, by Peter Warlock, and there is no evidence of performance in Purcell’s lifetime. This concert from Fretwork and Lucy Crowe, then, also looked back at English music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, less from the standpoint of Mace than from that of Purcell. It proved enjoyable and instructive in equal measure. 

Byrd opened the programme and occupied much of the first half, shared with Gibbons, split between both halves, the younger composer a mediator between Byrd and Purcell. The Queen’s Goodnight, like so much of what was to come, flowed and gently danced: not reduced to merely ‘being’ a dance, but rather partaking its spirit, remembrance, and rejuvenation. The fascination of its harmonies spoke for itself without underlining, whether of false relations or other dissonances. This was a golden age of instrumental variations too, and it showed. Here was a lovely curtain-raiser, also enabling Byrd’s 1588 consort song tributes to Sir Philip Sidney, one to a text by Sidney himself, the other an explicit tribute by Sir Edward Dyer, to emerge as much as companion pieces as contrasts. Crowe’s floating of her melodic line atop the viol music proved undeniably affecting, perhaps especially in the Dyer setting, O that most rare breast. Undimmed in courtliness and affect, it negotiated and combined confessional traditions and boundaries as skilfully as Byrd himself, finally sublimated with quiet ecstasy on ‘thy friend here living dieth’. In between, for instruments only, Two parts in one the fourth above, gently suggested both affinity and variety within the family of consort music, much as one might with later instrumental music of Haydn. Pleasure derived both from occasional grit in the oyster, as well as the oyster itself, was the thing. Closing the first half, owing to a fine ballad-like performance by Crowe and her supporting musicians. 

Gibbons provided another voice, less expansive in the first of his two Fantasias than the second, and perhaps even another world in whose counterpoint one could readily, pleasurably lose oneself. In Fretwork’s performances, both of those Fantasias and two In nomines, it sounded lighter, perhaps more aristocratic, though not necessarily less ingenuous. If I find it less moving, on the whole, than Byrd or Purcell, that may just be me. Now each flowery bank of May had a different flavour, with a nice ambiguity in performance as to any ultimate message, should there be one: ‘… whose love is life, whose hate is death’. In the second half, Faire is the rose was short, sweet, and subtle. 

We lost a Duo in G for two bass viols by Christopher Simpson, Asako Morikawa having sprained her thumb—one would never have known from other performances—but heard four of Purcell’s four-part Fantazias. If there were times when I felt Purcell’s well-nigh Mozartian combination of seemingly effortless mastery and fathomless depth might have been served better by a touch of Romanticism, these were fluent, comprehending performances with their own agenda that had no need to be mine. At their best, they showed a splendid inevitability in unfolding and had me wanting more. Many counsel us against importing modern conceptions of sadness, melancholia, and so on into this music, but so much the worse for them. Purcell’s modernity remains as striking as his historicity; as with any great art, of which this is certainly an instance, the one encourages the other.

O solitude, my sweetest choice, as with all these songs realised by Richard Boothby for his own consort, likewise spoke with almost modern unity of words, music, and underlying sentiment in performance. At any rate, one could hear why Purcell’s word-setting continues to inspire Anglophone composers. Music certainly did our cares beguile ‘for a while’ in the celebrated, loveliest song from Oedipus, King of Thebes. ‘When I have often heard young maids complaining’, from The Fairy Queen, spoke with readier humour, perhaps, than Byrd’s mistress and her dog. It was an animated, captivating performance, as was the surprise encore, as you are unlikely to have heard it before: Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’.

King's/Parry - Lenten Choral Music, 21 March 2018

Cadogan Hall

Palestrina: Stabat Mater

Tallis: Lamentations of Jeremiah (Part 1)

Poulenc: Quatre motets pour un temps de penitence

Lassus: Stabat Mater

Byrd: Ne irascaris, Domine; Civitas sancti tui

Brahms: Warum ist das Licht gegeben, op.74 no.2; Schaffe in mir, Gott, op.29 no.2

Choir of King’s College, Cambridge

Ben Parry (conductor)

Time was I could hear the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge almost any evening I chose, at least during term time. (If I remember correctly, Mondays were reserved for the mixed voice King’s Voices.) Not that I did, of course: I tended to go to my own chapel services more than others’; I also tended to prefer the services down the road at St John’s, less packed with tourists and thus seemingly less of a ‘concert’. I also preferred, in many ways, the more ‘Continental’ sound of St John’s to the typically ‘English’, whiter sound of King’s. Nevertheless, it was always quite an experience, first to set foot in that masterpiece of late Perpendicular Gothic – pay no heed to its cultured despisers, the same sort who will tell you that St Paul’s is a monstrous hybrid – gowned (and thus in slightly better seating than the non-Cambridge congregants), and to hear that celebrated choir, which, through radio and other recordings, I had known for so long before my time in the city that was essentially my home for fifteen years.

Ben Parry, an old boy from the choir and Assistant Director of Music at King’s, substituted for Stephen Cleobury, who was recovering from a bicycle accident. Parry certainly knew the choir and how to play to its strengths; it is difficult to imagine anyone having been disappointed, even in the almost diametrically opposed (to its echoing Chapel home) acoustic of Cadogan Hall. If some tempo choices, perhaps especially in the closing Brahms motets, seemed chosen more to help the boys than on ‘purely’ musical grounds, there is no great harm in that. The business of a collegiate (or other) choral foundation, after all, is far more than providing concert material; indeed, that is not really its business at all. Perhaps those works by Brahms, Warum ist das Licht gegeben? and Schaffe in mir, Gott, the latter a setting of part of Luther’s translation of the Miserere (Psalm 51), will have flowed more readily, especially in the relationship between different sections, and indeed have benefited from surer intonation, but there was much to enjoy, especially in their respective closing sections.

Two settings of the Stabat Mater, by Palestrina and Lassus, opened the concert’s two halves. Both were nicely shaded, without jarring (to my ears, without any) anachronism. The performance of the former imparted, when called upon, a real sense of ‘dec and can’ (decani and cantoris) antiphony in a different setting. It perhaps sounded closer to Monteverdi than often one hears, less ‘white’ than I had expected. Whatever the Council of Trent’s suspicion of the poem, I was struck by the essential simplicity, however artful, of the music and by the guiding role of words. Lassus’s setting came across as darker, a little more Northern perhaps. (He was, after all, Kapellmeister in Munich.) Within the context of an undoubtedly ‘Anglican’ performance, full of tone yet not too full, the sound seemed – or maybe it was just my ears adjusting – to become a little more Italianate as time progressed.


Poulenc’s Quatre motets pour un temps de penitence offer a challenge, not least intonational, to any choir, and are more often heard with older (female) voices. In these forthright performances, there was – rightly, I think – no great attempt made to ape other performing traditions, but there was nevertheless sometimes a harshness, even perhaps, in the closing ‘Tristis est anima mea’, an anger, we do not necessarily associate with the choir. The shading of ‘Vinea mea electa’ was intelligent, fuller than Anglican reputation would have you believe. If intonation proved far from perfect, especially in the opening ‘Timor et tremor’, nor should one exaggerate; one always knew where the music and indeed the text were heading.

The music of Tallis and Byrd is home territory for King’s – albeit here without the trebles. Naturally, in their absence, countertenors came more strongly to the fore. Parry wisely made no attempt to do too much in terms of word-painting in the Tallis; the words speak for themselves, and did so here especially on the Lenten cries for ‘Ierusalem, Ierusalem’ to return to her God. The two Byrd motets offered, for me, the highlight of the concert. Without a hint of blandness or routine, there was simply – or not so simply – that ineffable sense of ‘rightness’, of ease with the music, the composer’s recusancy notwithstanding. Music and words spoke freely, in greatly satisfying performances. As we heard in both, ‘Sion deserta facta est, Jerusalem desolata est.’ And yet, there was comfort to be had, if not in the wilderness and desolation of Jerusalems heavenly and earthly, then in their artistic representation – which is doubtless as it should be.

For St George's Day: 'migrant' and other suspect English music

I am, I hope, one of the least nationalistic people alive, but I could not help thinking, when seeing a Gramophone list of ‘Top 10 English Composers’ for St George’s Day, that we could do a great deal better than that. John Tavener (rather than John Taverner)? Delius, seriously? The ludicrously overrated Britten (who might make it in for The Turn of the Screw, but for little else)? Not that I expect members of the Campaign for Real Barnacles to agree, but I thought I should offer an alternative top ten, celebrating not only, in ‘nativist’ style, those born here, but those who lived and worked here.

John Taverner: composer of music of such complexity as to make most post-Schoenbergian music seem like ‘easy listening’. He saw the light, thank goodness; he seems to have become a proper Englishman and gave up on music.

 

 

William Byrd: a traitor in hock to un-English, Italianate Popery who composed for other such traitors (the politically correct might call them ‘recusants’ or even 'victims of state-sponsored religious persecution', the Muslims of their day).

 

 

Henry Purcell: the English Orpheus, whose music, alas, drew far too heavily upon Frenchified nonsense.

 

 

George Frideric Handel: a German ‘migrant’ in the service of German ‘migrant’ monarchs.

 

 

Franz Joseph Haydn: a shady ‘Croat’ who shamelessly took away ‘British jobs for British people’, even ‘sending home’ the money he purloined; Gordon Brown would have had none of that.

 

 

 

Felix Mendelssohn: Another temporary ‘migrant’, not only German, but shock horror, Jewish too. Still, he visited Birmingham.

 

 

Edward Elgar: composer of German music, masquerading as an Englishman.

 

 

Alexander Goehr: son of a German ‘migrant’ who, still worse, was a pupil of Schoenberg and had the temerity to introduced Monteverdi’s foreign 1610 Vespers to this scepter’d isle.

 

 

Harrison Birtwistle: composer of such cacophony that a group of common-sense Englishmen assumed their patriotic duty to ‘heckle’ performances of music closer to Stravinsky than to H Balfour Gardiner. From ‘The North’.

 

 

Rebecca Saunders: a woman, who moved to Germany. I can’t imagine why.
 

 

And I’ve still had to omit John Dowland and many others. Oh well: next year.

 

R.I.P. Sir David Willcocks (1919-2015)

Stile Antico - 'Miserere: Pentitential Music by Byrd and his Contemporaries', 26 March 2013

Wigmore Hall

Byrd – Miserere mei

Tallis – Salvator mundi I
Morley – Nolo mortem peccatoris
Byrd – Memento, homo
Tallis – Absterge Domine
Purge me, O Lord
White – Lamentations
Byrd – Emendemus in melius
Tallis – In jejunio et fletu
Byrd – Attend mine humble prayer
Tallis – Miserere nostri
Byrd – Miserere mihi
Sheppard – Haste thee O God
Byrd – Infelix ego

 

Other commitments have thwarted my hopes on at least a couple of other occasions to hear Stile Antico at the Wigmore Hall. Having heard excellent things about the group, I was not to be disappointed in this concert of music not necessarily written for Holy Week, though some of it certainly was, yet eminently suited to performance at a time of Lenten penitence. Though the Arts and Crafts cupola above the stage is secular in theme – the Soul of Music gazing upwards to the Genius of Harmony – it often seems to me to have something of the sanctuary to it. On this occasion, it almost seemed as if a little of Westminster Cathedral or indeed the chapel at my present college, Royal Holloway, University of London, had come to Wigmore Street, and very welcome that imaginary visitation was too.

 

As one of the winning, informative spoken introductions mentioned, boundaries between domestic and church music were often blurred during this period. That was not just the case for recusants; conforming congregations would often like to perform music at home, though naturally not every congregant would have the musical ability to sing Byrd and Tallis. At any rate, a nice balance was struck, a balance that varied according to the work, between ‘domestic’ intimacy and a fuller, rich sound heard when all twelve members of Stile Antico sang. The starkest contrast in that respect would be when Byrd’s Attend mine humble prayer, granted just three solo voices, was followed by the full complement of a dozen for Tallis’s Miserere nostri. Variation in forces never, however, precluded continuity in performance; it was accomplished with minimal fuss, unlike some of those concerts in which rearrangement seems almost to take as long as performance itself.

 

Byrd’s Miserere mei offered pleasingly full, rich sound to open with. Anachronistic though it may be to describe this as ‘Anglican’ music, it has certainly become so, Byrd proving not just a staple but a highpoint of music lists for ‘quires and places where they sing’. It was not long before I almost imagined I could see the candles of Evensong, taken back to my undergraduate days in which the mixed choir of Jesus College, Cambridge, benefited from an organ scholar with particular enthusiasm for Byrd (and equally creditably, a particular lack of enthusiasm for the more meretricious fringes of the nineteenth-century repertory). Tallis followed, with the first Salvator mundi from the 1575 Cantiones sacrae, jointly published by him and Byrd. Tone was plangent without being puritanical. The music was permitted to speak, as it were, ‘for itself’, but not in the occasionally bland fashion that can emerge from groups who treasure purity a little too much and stress the words not quite enough. Dissonances were not exaggerated – a common failing in the opposite direction – but were felt in tandem with the text beseeching the redeeming Saviour of the world for succour. In a sense, they tantalised all the more for that, rather than being presented as faux Gesualdo.

 

Relative simplicity was offered in Morley’s Nolo mortem peccatoris, but the painful meaning was clear throughout, the Latin burden offering carefully judged contrast of hope with the English verse of ‘painful smart’. As so often, the alto line offered especially piquant suffering – I certainly do not mean that pejoratively! – in Tallis’s Absterge Domine. The request that God remember His good will – ‘bonae voluntatis’ – seemed to receive subtle emphasis, a sign at least of hope. Robert White’s Lamentations received a fuller, more choral rendition, following the four single voices allotted Tallis’s Purge me, O Lord, though clarity remained paramount. An unhurried performance proved attentive in equal measure to music and text. In the face of such an imploring setting, less overtly so than the soon-to-come seconda prattica of Monteverdi and the nascent Baroque, but subtly apparent nonetheless, how could the words ‘Hierusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum’ (‘Jerusalem, turn to the Lord thy God’) not be heeded?

 

Serenity, again skilfully avoiding the aforementioned snare of blandness, was to be heard in Byrd’s Emendemus in melius. The harmonic spice of Tallis’s In jejunio et fletu was well judged, not least on account of the fine balance struck once again between verbal and musical expression. Three solo voices might be a difficult texture, but it did not sound so, whether in work or performance, in Byrd’s effortlessly negotiated – at least apparently so – Attend mine humble prayer. Tallis’s Miserere nostri was taken with glorious breadth – and yet, to take an apocryphal quotation out of context, it moved. John Sheppard’s Haste thee o God may have been ‘older’, but this piece from the reign of Edward VI, did not necessarily sound so; indeed, its (deceptive) simplicity in some senses at least looked forward as much as back. Byrd’s masterly Infelix ego received a fine performance in conclusion, Janus-faced, harking back to the rich heritage of the votive antiphon and forward-looking in its more ‘modern’, text-focused quality. Above all, it benefited from a keen sense of overarching form, not as something containing, let alone constricting, but as liberating framework for expression. It is difficult not to wish that such a glorious piece of music, every inch the equal of England’s greatest later composers such as Purcell and Birtwistle, might go on forever, but in its ultimate finitude, whatever its undeniable expansiveness, there lies a Lenten message too. For a fitting encore, we returned to Tallis: an exquisitely blended performance of O sacrum convivium.    

Chapelle du Roi/Dixon: Byrd, Fayrfax, Sheppard, Tallis, and Victoria, 17 December 2011

St John’s, Smith Square

Sarum chant: A solis ortus cardine
Byrd – Rorate cœli
Fayrfax – Magnificat, ‘Regale’
Sheppard: Verbum caro
Tallis – Beati Immaculati
Tallis – Suscipe quæso Domine
Tallis – If ye love me
Sheppard – I give you a new commandment
Byrd – Hodie Christus natus est
Tallis – Videte miraculum
Tallis – Te Deum
Victoria – Alma Redemptoris Mater

Chapelle du Roi
Alistair Dixon (director)

The ‘Christmas Festival’ at St John’s, Smith Square is now well under way, despite there being a week to go of Advent, a peculiarity of nomenclature rendered all the more peculiar given that sacred music provides the staple diet. But the name chosen for the present concert was also a little odd: ‘Meet the Tudors’. There was nothing especially regal about the works performed, no more or no less than one might expect from a programme of late-fifteenth-, sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century English sacred music. Byrd’s Gradualia, from which both the motets performed here are taken, was published two years after the death of Elizabeth I. Victoria’s presence, whilst welcome, also seemed odd, given the vague ‘concept’: a nod to Philip II perhaps? Chapelle du Roi, or rather its director, Alistair Dixon, would have been better advised either to let the music speak for itself, or to provide more of a guiding thematic link.

For the music is perfectly capable of speaking for itself, especially in capable performances such as these generally proved to be. The opening, processional Sarum hymn provided more ‘historical’ perspective than much of the rest of the programme, reminding us of the richness of English mediæval tradition, liturgical and musical, much of it wantonly destroyed by the Reformers’ zeal. Byrd’s introit, Rorate cœeli, flowed yet yielded, the eight voices of Chapelle du Roi, showing the advantages of a small choir even to those of us who might be inclined to hanker after the likes of King’s College, Cambridge, in such repertoire. Robert Fayrfax’s Magnificat was the sole representative of the Eton Choirbook. It unfolded as ‘naturally’ as one had any right to expect, a fine centrepiece to the first half. Not for the last time, however, there was a degree of dryness to the lower voices, the tenors especially, and there were a few intonational difficulties. More seriously, the ‘Esurientes’ section had to be restarted following a serious lapse of ensemble, though Dixon carried that difficult task off with a minimum of fuss.

John Sheppard’s Christmas Day Verbum caro suffered from occasional shortness of breath, leading phrases to fall away a little more than they should, though there were some properly plangent contributions to enjoy from the two counter-tenors. It was a pity, then, that they lapsed somewhat into hooting at the opening of Tallis’s Beati Immaculati. That, otherwise, was an interesting as well as musically satisfying performance, given that it was presented in a Latin version, on the supposition that the composer’s Blessed are those that be undefiled was itself a contrafactum version of a Latin original. Tallis’s Suscipe quæso Domine received a disarmingly heartfelt, expressive reading, its unusual qualities – not least the seven-part texture – observed and communicated, without undue exaggeration.

Tallis returned after the interval. If ye love me – most collegiate choirs love this anthem very much – was sung by four solo men’s voices, likewise Sheppard’s I give you a new commandment, albeit four different voices: now two tenors and two basses. (Neither piece was conducted.) Byrd’s Hodie Christus natus est was beset by a degree of fuzziness from the tenors, though it received a lively, if perhaps unduly hard-driven, performance. Videte miraculum, by Tallis, formed the counterpart to Fayrfax’s work in the first half. Written for the First Vespers of Candlemas, its Marian dissonances – it being impressed upon us how Mary is laden with a noble burden, ‘Stans onerata nobili onere Maria’ – were expressively handled and projected. ‘Knowing that she is not a wife, she rejoices to be a mother’ (‘Et matrem se lætam cognosci, quæ se nescit uxorem’), the two sopranos in particular emphasising the imploring nature of Tallis’s word-setting here.

We remained with Tallis for his English Te Deum. The initial cantorial intonation was not blessed with the strongest intonation in another sense. There was, moreover, something oddly chamber-like to the performance, the only occasion when I truly missed the forces of a larger choir. Somehow, the style seemed more appropriate to a recusant Byrd motet than to the grandeur of words and music. Nevertheless, antiphonal placing of the singers – essentially, one-to-a-part double choir – offered compensatory keenness of response, almost madrigalian in relatively-restrained English fashion. No ‘Gloria’ was given. Victoria’s Alma Redemptoris Mater sounded as if from another world, the warmth of its opening immediately felt: this was clearly music from Mediterranean, albeit Counter-Reformatory, climes.