The release of the first
and second batches of Harmonia Mundi’s new mid-price Gold
series – see Rob Barnett’s
overview of
the first batch – serves to remind me that there are even
greater bargains to be found in their back catalogue, much
of it in the super-budget Classical Express series, from
which I have singled out this recording which I specially
recommend and one of Corelli’s Concerti Grossi, Op.6,
the review of which
will follow soon.
Those who saw The Sixteen’s
series of four programmes entitled
Sacred Music on
BBC4 will know that the music of William Byrd had both
a public and a private aspect. For the Chapel Royal he
composed music which most successfully adapted the pre-reformation
polyphonic style for the Anglican rite but his three Masses,
the
Cantiones Sacræ and the
Gradualia could
only have been intended for private celebration of the
Roman rite. Such worship was proscribed, very strictly
so after the papal bull
Regnans in excelsis, releasing
Roman Catholics from allegiance to Elizabeth, and the Spanish
Armada had made all followers of the older rite potential
traitors. Some of the Eastertide music on this recording
could have found a place at the Chapel Royal as anthems,
but the music for the Assumption provides for a feast no
longer celebrated in the Book of Common Prayer and the
Marian pieces were replaced by works more in accord with
reformed sentiment at the end of Mattins and Evensongs ‘in
Quires and places where they sing’.
The title
Music for
a Hidden Chapel is, therefore, appropriate, the chapel
in question probably that of the Petre family at Ingatestone
in Essex. Celebrations there would have to have been
fairly low-key events, without the ceremony which would
have attended performances of Byrd’s
Great Service and
Second
Service at the Chapel Royal or some great cathedral,
though the three well-known Masses for three, four and
five voices, probably also written for Ingatestone, can
be made to sound well when sung by a cathedral choir,
as on the Christ Church, Oxford, recordings for Nimbus
which I
reviewed recently.
Christ Church choir intersperse
their performances of those masses with music from the
Gradualia;
since writing that review I have been listening to these
recordings again and I now feel that the items from
Gradualia come
over less well in performances of that scale. I have also
been listening quite frequently to this Chanticleer recording – I
mentioned it briefly in the Nimbus review – and have been
feeling more and more that Chanticleer, a group of twelve
singers, offer just the right proportion for this music. And
what wonderful music it is, complete 5-part settings of
the propers for the principal Mass of Easter Day and that
for the Assumption, together with three Marian antiphons.
I might have preferred
to have heard the settings of the Mass propers in tandem
with one of the three Byrd Masses. You could, of course,
rip the relevant tracks and The Tallis Scholars’ recording
of the Masses (best obtained on the 2-for-1 set CDGIM208)
and create your own programme, but that would be very fussy
and I haven’t tried doing it, even though I already have
all the relevant tracks on the iTunes jukebox.
The recording, too, is
excellent. My only grumble concerns the very unattractive
covers of all these Classical Express CDs: Harmonia Mundi
had a very attractive cover for their original issue of
this recording; surely it would have cost little extra
to have reprinted this with the new catalogue number. If
you want this recording with a more attractive cover, it
is also available as part of a 3-CD set of English Church
Music on HMX290 7454.56. For better artwork still, enclosing
equally fine performances of music from the
Gradualia,
go for Hyperion Helios budget-price CDH55047, William Byrd
Choir/Bruno Turner – no overlap with the HM CD – though
the music sounds more disjointed there, since no attempt
is made to link individual pieces.
All these Classical Express
recordings are available as downloads from eMusic in very
acceptable mp3 sound but, whereas the Byrd is good value – five
tracks for a total of £1.20 on the 50-track-per month tariff)
some other recordings in the series are not. A recording
of Corelli’s
Concerti Grossi, Op.6, for example,
with 26 tracks on the first disc and 33 on the second,
works out much more expensive than iTunes’ charge of £4.74
per CD or the £5 or so each for which the CDs in this series
can be purchased in the UK.
The moral is that, while
it’s worthwhile to download the Byrd, you’d be better to
save yourself the trouble with the Corelli and buy the
CDs. The same is true of Hyperion Helios mp3s on iTunes – don’t
dream of downloading CDH55047 for £7.99, iTunes’ standard
price for full-price and bargain-price Hyperions, when
you can buy the CD for around a fiver in the UK.
You don’t get any notes
if you download any of these recordings, though Harmonia
Mundi offer the texts of the Byrd on their website – you
really will need these texts. Whichever way you obtain
it, this CD is well worth its modest cost. It would make
an excellent supplement to any collection which already
contained the three- four- and five-part Masses.
Those who wish to pursue
the ‘hidden’ Byrd further could do much worse than with
a 1997 Chandos recording entitled
The Caged Byrd – music
for voices, viola & harpsichord from a time of persecution,
Volume 2 (CHAN0609, I Fagiolini and Sophie Yates – available
on CD or as a download, as a 192k mp3 or in lossless format,
from Chandos’s theclassicalshop.net). The programme ranges
from a setting of the English words
Rejoice unto the
Lord, probably sung to Queen Elizabeth in 1586, to
Byrd’s setting of the bitter but ultimately hopeful poem
Why
do I use my paper, inke and penne, on the death of
the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion. This and the adaptation
of
The noble famous Queen to refer to the execution
of Mary Queen of Scots, also included, represents the closest
that Byrd and those in whose company he moved at Ingatestone
came to sedition.
The Chandos recording
also includes two works from the interchange between Byrd
and continental composers in which the words of Psalm 137
(Vulgate 136)
By the waters of Babylon become a
coded symbol of the persecuted Roman Catholic minority. Philippe
de Monte set the opening of the psalm and Byrd replied
tellingly with the section ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s
song in a foreign land?’ This exchange of motets in paired
settings is more fully documented on a Classics for Pleasure
CD (5 86048 2) but the small-scale performances on the
Chandos recording are more to the point than those by King’s
College Choir under David Willcocks on that CFP recording. The
Chandos singing is a trifle unvaried by comparison with
that of Chanticleer on the Harmonia Mundi recording, but
probably reflects accurately the kind of performance which
Byrd would have heard.
A similar small-scale
collection on Naxos is more vigorously performed by Red
Byrd and the Rose Consort (8.550604) but does not concentrate,
as the Chandos does, on the ‘hidden’ music of Byrd the
recusant.
Brian Wilson