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.

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.    

R.I.P. Robert Tear, 1939-2011