<em>The old faith of England is this year’s focus of The Sixteen, finds Serenhedd James</em>.
A wise, sharp-eyed owl peers out from the programme of The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage for 2023. Its title this year is “A Watchful Gaze” and it launched at SJE Arts in Oxford on March 11. It criss-crosses the country (with two journeys across the Irish Sea) until October 26, when it closes at Kings Place in London.
The choir’s annual musical progress honours the prolific Elizabethan musician William Byrd, the 400th anniversary of whose death falls in July, and whom conductor Harry Christophers describes as “one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, widely admired both at home and abroad”.
It is no exaggeration – and nor is Christophers’ follow-up comment that “the influence he had on future generations was immense”. Most choral singers in the Anglosphere will have sung one of his works; his output is all the more remarkable for him having been a Catholic composer under Elizabeth I. The strange compromise that she brought to the Act of Uniformity in 1559 applied to Byrd as well: she liked his music, and so he flourished.
Recusancy is to the fore, however: in the first half, “Arise Lord into thy rest”, “Ne irascaris” and “Civitas sancti tui”; in the second “Tristitia et anxietas”, “Turn our captivity O Lord”, “Quomodo cantabimus?” and “Vigilate”, from which the tour takes its name. Simultaneously they showcase Byrd the musician and Byrd the craftsman, but also Byrd the political commentator. The history of the Catholic Church in England is never far away.
Dissonant false relations pepper “Sion deserta facta est, Jerusalem, desolata est”: resolving sweetly enough but not before making their jarring presence known. Byrd set text from books illegally smuggled into Protestant England from the Catholic continent; his setting of English words for the requirements of the new state religion have all the verve and colour of his Latin output, but there are coded messages for those with ears to hear and eyes to see.
The sorrowing psalms, like In convertendo Dominum - to say nothing of the Lamentations themselves – spoke deeply and searingly to Byrd’s outlawed Catholicism. Andrew Stewart’s observation in the programme notes is full of pathos: “The psalmist’s metaphor of seeds sown in tears and reaped in joy would have felt bittersweet to a composer who, for<br>all his Catholic faith, knew that he was destined to die as a member of<br>a diminishing religious minority.”
All this was watched with concern from Catholic Europe, of course; England was only literally an island, and composers who influenced Byrd are also represented: Clemens non Papa, from Flanders, whose earlier Tristitia et anxietas influenced Byrd’s own, and Philip van Wilder, also Flemish by birth, on whose madrigal “O doux regard” Byrd leant heavily for “Ne irascaris”. Both originals are on the bill, alongside Clemens’s “Ego flos campi”.
It’s a delight to find Philippe de Monte in the line-up: he was Kapellmeister to the Holy Roman Emperor, and in 1583 sent Byrd a setting of Super flumina Babylonis – ending with the poignant question: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Byrd produced “Quomodo cantabimus” in response, restating and resetting the tale of Israel’s exile for a contemporary audience. Both are performed back-to-back for full effect.
Most striking are two new commissions, tributes to Byrd, from the Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova. Her take on “Arise Lord into thy rest” has hints of Vaughan Williams and William Mathias; “Turn our captivity O Lord” evokes James MacMillan and Arvo Pärt. Both are exciting for their newness and pleasing in their palette, with challenging tonal movement.
Born just after Henry VIII’s break with the papacy, Byrd lived through the to-ing and fro-ing of the chaotic last few years of Henry’s reign, saw the swing to hard Protestantism of Edward VI and then Mary I’s doomed attempt at its reversal. Under Elizabeth, hopes were raised and dashed: at Lincoln the puritanical canons censured him for “excess of popish organ playing”, and he headed to London, where he honed his distinctive compositional style.
There, too, his double life began. He was the leading light of the Chapel Royal, where he turned out setting after setting of English canticles and anthems to suit the Anglican liturgies of the Prayer Book of 1559. Meanwhile, he dedicated his private output to his great Latin works with their covert (and not-so-covert) narratives of the English Catholic Church as Israel in Egypt and Judah in Babylon.
All this is covered in impressive depth in the accompanying notes; if I have one quibble it is that if we are truly to understand Byrd the composer, then we have to understand fully Byrd the Catholic, and by extension what he actually professed. Catholics do not believe that at Mass “Christ’s body and blood [are] momentarily present in the bread and wine”; they believe that the substance of the elements is changed for as long as their accidents endure.
Surely it was that belief – that God chooses to tabernacle Himself with his people – which drove Byrd to put on the risky mantle of a prominent recusant in the dangerous age of a fickle queen. The same belief, among others, led the English Martyrs to rack and to rope: their cause was one for which they were content to shed their blood. And yet the wretchedness of its context somehow makes the music all the more transcendent.
It speaks of Church and creed; of polity and pragmatism; of conscience and compromise; of Tyburn and the Tower. It is no surprise that Christophers and his singers draw out every nuance and wring out every tear. As the harmonies and dramatic suspensions move towards their resolutions, it’s not hard to imagine the jeers of the crowd as hurdles are dragged through the streets, or the thud of the axe on the block.
For more on The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage, visit thesixteen.com
Passiontide: a new setting
Settings of the Passion story by an English composer in the English language have always been thin on the ground, probably nervous of competition with Handel’s Messiah. And despite some interesting modern examples – including a neglected epic by Jonathan Harvey called Passion and Resurrection, written for Winchester Cathedral in 1981, as well as next-generational updates on St John and St Luke by James MacMillan – the ones that people tend to know aren’t necessarily of shining calibre or spiritual substance. There are the 1970s pop jobs, Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, which I suppose count as Passion narratives. And there’s the sincere but stodgy Victoriana of John Stainer’s Crucifixion or JH Maunder’s Edwardian counterpart Olivet to Calvary: music loved by many an amateur choral society but, to my ears, dismal.
So a new contender can only be welcome. One recently released on disc – from the Divine Art label – is Passiontide by Simon Mold: an 80-minute score composed in 2010 for various performers connected with Leicester Cathedral. Mold isn’t quite a household name but he’s been active on the UK choral circuit as a singer and teacher for many years. And what he’s written here is something carefully calculated to be within the reach of amateur performers – none of it unduly challenging, and based eclectically on musical sources that range from Bach (to the point of parody) through to Vaughan Williams and Rutter.
As for the text, it’s almost entirely in English, drawn from 19th-century hymnodists, assorted psalms and a bizarre chunk of the medieval Dream of the Rood in which the wooden beams of the Cross expound on their journey from tree trunk to sacred relic. Most of the words come from a 17th-century text published as Christologia, or, A Metrical Paraphrase on the History of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by one Elisha Coles, who took it upon himself to rewrite the gospel texts in rhyming couplets.
That Coles was of Puritan stock might not commend his work to devout Catholics, and he’s a strange choice for this work, responsible for quaint archaicisms that occasionally descend to the level of pantomime. “Must I, O Father, drink this bitter cup?/Thy will be done: I’ll freely drink it up” is a bathetic case in point that doesn’t altogether dignify Christ’s agony in the garden. More positively, there’s a pleasing succinctness in the way the story unfolds, organised into five scenes – Last Supper, Gethsemane, Pilate, Crucifixion and Death – pinned together with reflective motets or hymns that serve much the same functions as Bach’s chorales and deliver a competently constructed tunefulness that will please many a chorus. Beyond that, I can only say I wish the music had more definition, strength and edge: it’s unadventurous in idiom, with not enough to captivate the heart or memory. But it has practicable uses for a parish choir. And though the recording, produced by Mold himself, hasn’t the vocal excellence expected in these days of elite professional consorts, it too has uses – as a demo disc to introduce the piece to possible performers. There will surely be some.
