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.

'Hymns to the Virgin': Tallis Scholars/Phillips - Lassus, Josquin, Guerrero, Martin, Stravinsky, Pärt, and Isaac, 21 December 2021

St John’s Smith Square

Lassus: Alma redemptoris mater
Josquin: Missa Ave maris stella
Guerrero: Maria Magdalene et altera Maria; Ave virgo sanctissima
Matthew Martin: Sanctissima
Stravinsky: Bogoroditse devo
Pärt: Virgencita
Isaac: Virgo prudentissima

Tallis Scholars
Peter Phillips (director)

St John’s Smith Square’s 36th Christmas Festival has gone ahead as planned. That in itself is something to grant seasonal cheer, especially at what again is proving a trying time for all of us. So too was this concert from festival regulars the Tallis Scholars, with music spanning a period of more than half a millennium, from Josquin’s Missa Ave maris stella in the late fifteenth century to Matthew Martin’s 2017 reimagining of Francesco Guerrero’s motet Ave virgo santissima, first published in 1566.

The concert opened with Lassus’s polychoral motet, Alma redemptoris mater, separation and recombination of the two ‘choirs’ (four singers apiece) taking place in typically patient, unshowy unfolding from Peter Phillips and his singers. Like much of the evening’s programme, it sounded bathed in Marian radiance, albeit of distinctly different varieties that yet all remained worlds distant from the concerted likes of Monteverdi or Mozart. In context, Lassus’s eight-part antiphon—he also set the text for five and, twice, six voices—sounded almost as if an overture.

If so, it was an overture to the mass honouring the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Josquin des Prez. We heard a properly responsorial ‘Kyrie’, its opening upward fifth signalling to all and sundry the cantus firmus that permeates so much of the setting in a motivic fashion it is difficult not to think of as ‘modern’, however problematic and ultimately unsatisfactory the notion may be. The ‘Gloria’ offered a not entirely dissimilar sense of unfolding and building towards climax such as we had heard in Lassus. Words were never underlined, yet nonetheless ‘spoke’ as Phillips and the Tallis Scholars traced, even inhabited Josquin’s work’s musical contours. (And no, it does not seem to me anachronistic here to speak of a musical work.) A glowing, full-toned ‘Sanctus’ contrasted nicely with the duets of the ‘Benedictus’. The crowning canonical writing of the ‘Agnus Dei’, canons recalling earlier writing and seemingly underlining the form of threefold petition, was permitted a sense of the expansive: in performance as in work, one might say. At any rate, there was a sense not only of conclusion but of culmination, without attempting to transplant later values not at home here.

Following the interval, we turned to two motets by Guerrero. His Maria Magdalene et altera Maria tells of that celebrated discovery on Easter morning. Here were a different voice, method, and subject matter; a different radiance too, I think. Yet again, there was that sense of patient unfolding and building unobtrusively towards a fine climax on ‘surrexit’. Our Saviour was risen indeed. There was a graver, more hymnal beauty to be heard and felt in Ave virgo sanctissima. Indeed, the prayerful quality in which I felt involved, no mere observer, imparted a sense of physical and metaphysical kneeling. Romantic nonsense, perhaps, though harmless if so. Martin’s reimagining, written to accompany the original, had Guerrero’s lines travel in lines of refracted, relative dissonance, within a tonal framework. Intonation sounded spot on, as surely it must be. It was rather lovely to hear in context.

The radical simplicity of Stravinsky’s Bogoroditse Devo quite simply brooked no dissent, as jewel-like an ‘object’ as, say, the Octet. It simply ‘was’—and doubtless will be. Arvo Pärt’s Virgencita took a lot longer to say rather less, yet the performance was one of evident fondness, warmth and patience bringing ‘holy minimalist’ process to the fore. Some attractive, almost Poulenc-like chords (in abstracto, not functionally), quite resplendent in performance, made the time pass more quickly. The encore, Pärt’s minute-long setting of the same Old Slavonic text set by Stravinsky was written for King’s College Cambridge's Service of Nine Lessons of Carols. The singers imparted a welcome sense of carolling dance to its despatch.

In between we heard Heinrich Isaac’s magnificent Virgo prudentissima, making the case for Archduke—soon Emperor—Maximilian’s piety, the Virgin his heavenly advocate. When compared with, say, Josquin, display of musical intellect seemed more overt. Canonic procedures came more strongly to the fore, propelling words in a fashion that had very much its own direction and directedness. Not for nothing did Webern write his dissertation on Isaac. This was an arresting polyphonic and cosmogonic tour past dominions, fiery cherubim, angels, archangels and others both above and below, to the Mother of Heaven and thence to Him who had taken her up. Yet we fittingly returned to her, ‘excellent as the Sun’, and sounding so. Hierarchies of music and theology created and reinforced one another, preparing us, so it seemed, for further, Christmas mysteries.

Tallis Scholars/Phillips - Taverner, Cornysh, Browne, Tallis, and Sheppard, 2 October 2018

Cadogan Hall

Taverner: Magnificat a 6

Cornysh: Ave Maria

Browne: Stabat Mater

Tallis: Te Deum ‘for meanes’

Cornysh: Gaude virgo mater Christi

Sheppard: Jesus salvator seculi; Gaude virgo Christiphera

The Tallis Scholars

Peter Phillips (director)

In their typical non-emphatic way, the Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips presented here a selection of English sacred music from the Eton Choirbook to Tallis. There was little to ruffle anyone’s feathers here, little in the way of overt ‘interpretation’ – certainly in a modern sense – but ample opportunity to appreciate the mastery on offer in this music, its remoteness from many of our present concerns, and some fine singing.

The evening’s full complement of fourteen singers opened with John Taverner’s six-part Magnificat, ably, convincingly reconstructed from the parts that remain. Plainsong roots were evident – that is, after all, how it opens – as was the great musical flowering, both in work and performance, from that most fertile of soil. Melismatic duetting sopranos and tenors on ‘eius’, the whole choir likewise on ‘suo’: detail was attended to without exaggeration. The greater unfolding was, unsurprisingly, the thing, however. ‘Sound’ did not especially vary; textural variety spoke for itself, Taverner’s ornate doxology culminating in a radiant ‘Amen’.

William Cornysh’s Ave Maria – not the familiar text – perhaps sounds more ‘austere’ to our modern ears, closer to its mediæval past, not least in terms of harmonic relationships. Such would hardly be surprising, given its earlier date of composition. Yet it speaks – and here, in performance, spoke – just as clearly, if differently. Just as much ‘happens’, so long as one listens. John Brown’s Stabat Mater sounded, rightly or wrongly, somewhere in between: as much, I think, a matter of programming as of material. It flowed beautifully, sadness lying in the words rather than in any Romantic, ‘emotional’ sense. Antiphonal passages – such as that between soprano and bass parts, ‘Quis non potest contristari…’ – caught the ear and, more important, returned us to experience and contemplation of the celebrated poem. Nevertheless, the cries of ‘Crucifige, crucifige’, if hardly Bachian, seemed to echo through the ages with the accumulated weight of crucified tradition.

Tallis’s Te Deum ‘for meanes’, which opened the second half, immediately sounded very much of ‘our’ Anglican tradition, even thought that requires more than a little backdating. Its English text is one thing, of course, but its directness, its interplay between ‘dec’ and ‘can’ (the two sides of the choir’), its harmony, and much else had it sound more modern than perhaps it is. One drew parallels, of course, not least points of detail – false relations, for instance – with what had gone before, but it was a different church, a different Church too, brought forth in one’s visual as well as aural imagination. Might it have been performed with a little more drama? Yes. Should it have been? Perhaps. Again, however, there was much to glean from the gentle, informed respect with which these voices and their director brought it to life.

Cornysh’s Gaude virgo mater Christi seemed to offer merely in its notes something a little more – this is highly relative – of a lament. Our conceptions of what ‘fits’ a text, however, are not necessarily those of a fifteenth-century composer. It would be mightily strange if they were. The music once again drew us in to the text, another hymn of praise to the Virgin. Two works by John Sheppard concluded the concert. The Compline alternation of chant and polyphony founded upon it in Sheppard’s Jesu salvator saeculi yielded subtle secrets, not least in the surprising – so long as one listened! – final ‘Amen’. The Marian votive antiphon, Gaude virgo Cristiphera – according to James M. Potter’s helpful booklet note, the only example we have from Sheppard – took longer, considerably longer over its words, offering a radiant sense of culmination. This, one felt, was a world of wonders almost yet not quite vanished. The more we listened, the more we shared in it: quite right too.

The encore, Purcell’s Hear my Prayer, still sounds very much ‘with us’: too much so, some might argue, accusing us of sentimentalising. So be it; those grinding dissonances implored as few harmonies can. The English Orpheus will always be with us; so too will his predecessors – as, indeed, will his successors. Why choose?

Tallis Scholars - The Song of Mary, 21 December 2010

St John's, Smith Square

Taverner – Dum transisset Sabbatum
Taverner – Magnificat à 4
John Plummer – Anna mater matris
Taverner – Magnificat à 6
Monteverdi – Missa in illo tempore

Tallis Scholars
Peter Phillips (director)


St John’s, Smith Square is currently celebrating its twenty-fifth annual Christmas festival. Looking at the other names involved, there is very much an ‘Early Music’ emphasis, but this offering from the Tallis Scholars was more restrained, in temper and in content, with respect to its seasonal contribution than one suspects some others may have been. Indeed, two Magnificats notwithstanding, it was more a Marian than an Advent or Christmas survey.

John Taverner’s music occupied most of the first half. First came the Easter responsory, Dum transisset Sabbatum, telling of the three Marys going to the tomb intending to anoint the body of Christ, culminating in the first Alleluia since the onset of Lent. Though the Tallis Scholars tend not to occupy themselves with exaggerated wordpainting, there was a (relatively) sensual emphasis upon ‘aromata’, the aromatic oils the women would use. Plainsong sounded evocative in the best sense: restrained, permitting the words to speak, preparing the way for polyphony. All twelve voices had been employed for the responsory; four left the stage for Taverner’s four-part Magnificat, sung two to a part. The chant was nicely flexible, contrasting with what one might think of as audible, though not rigid, bar lines for the flowering of polyphony. Wordpainting could again be heard without exaggeration upon ‘dispersit’, the proud duly scattered. Save for an uncharacteristically weak bass entry upon ‘Esurientes’, this was again a fine performance, which, like that of the six-part setting, furnished a sense of the canticle as a whole.

In the latter, the sopranos who had now joined the throng were able to soar. There was naturally something of a more ‘choral’ sound to the ensemble with the greater numbers, but Taverner’s polyphonic lines remained crystal clear. I much appreciated well-turned melismata upon ‘nostros’ and ‘saecula,’ and a radiant culiminating doxology. All that was missing was Taverner’s other setting, in five parts, but the Tallis Scholars are due to record all three. In between the Magnificat settings, we heard John Plummer’s fifteenth-century supplication to Anna, the mother of the Virgin. Five solo voices, without Peter Phillips as conductor, created a lighter texture, through which one could hear very well what Alexandra Coghlan in her programme note referred to as ‘relentless F major’. In that sense, the work sounded relatively modern, yet the musicians’ delivery of their lines and occasional hints of a drone impressed upon us a more mediæval quality.

The second half brought Monteverdi’s parody mass on a motet by Gombert, the Missa in illo tempore, four hundred years old this year. Where the contemporary Vespers are full of avant-gardist seconda prattica, the a cappella mass displays the composer’s command of the old-style prima prattica. Phillips’s shaping of the Kyrie impressed: the opening ‘Kyrie eleison’ leisurely bit not staid, evincing the delight in sacred music as music that has always been a hallmark of his approach. Liturgical reconstructions and so forth are the province of others. The responding ‘Christe eleison’ and finally the second ‘Kyrie’ statement evinced a cumulative gathering of pace, the latter quite glorious. I cannot claim that I could discern every word of the Gloria, but the wash of sound was beautiful in its own right, and the calls of ‘Gloria’ could certainly be heard; the intonation of a new, more sombre mood upon ‘qui tollis peccata mundi’ was unmistakeable, within again a fine sense of the ‘movement’ as a whole. The Credo largely followed suit, an especial highlight being the properly luminous – obliquely seasonal? – ‘Lumen de Lumine’, whilst the Mystery of the Incarnation itself was movingly expressed in the still centre: ‘et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto, ex Maria Virgine, et homo factus est.’ The final section, from ‘Et in Spiritum Sanctum,’ provided a more overtly Venetian-sounding climax. Hints of this could be heard in the melodic aspects of the Sanctus and Benedictus, though more than equally apparent was the ghost of Palestrina. In the unhurried unfolding of the Agnus Dei, relatively austere and very much of the prima prattica, one was reminded once again – though how could one forget? – that musical beauty requires no instruments other than the voice. As an encore to this fiftieth appearance of the Tallis Scholars at St John’s, we heard a carol, Hieronymus Praetorius’s Joseph lieber, Joseph mein.