Tudor church music - Phaia PHU005.7 [RH]: Classical Music Reviews

The liner-notes for this disc are very much a trap for the unwary. You could quite easily come away with the idea of the Clerkes of Oxenford being an active group. Only the recording date, listed on the back of the box, gives the game away. These recordings are nearly forty years old. Astonishing.

The music here is astonishing too. The Clerkes of Oxenford were a choir unlike any other. Professor David Wulstan founded it in order to export the music of early Tudor England and as a practical crucible for his theories about pitch and about performance.

Typically early Tudor polyphony had two upper parts, the mean and above this a stratospherically high treble part. Wulstan used the choir to prove that it was and is possible for young singers to take these parts and sing them with power and with clarity and lightness. He did not use boys, but young women. He produced a body of recordings in which the choir performs music of this period at pitches that few other groups have attempted.

Wulstan as a professor, practitioner and editor was enormously influential on a whole generation of British performers. Anyone who has heard The Sixteen or The Tallis Scholars has heard ensembles influenced in some ways by these performances.

The performances are beautifully controlled and perfectly shaped. The girls singing the treble part produce high clear, vibrato-less sounds which blend and, combined with the high pitch of the other parts, cause the polyphony to achieve clarity and transparency.

There are disadvantages; Wulstan was clearly not interested in words. There is no attempt at period pronunciation and words are clearly secondary to perfection of musical line. There is also the suspicion that the singers could tire. In the Gibbons works on the first disc, the solo lines are not always taken at the same level as the choral singing.

The sound of the choir is quite big and robust. There are clearly rather more singers in the Tallis than Alistair Dixon used for his recording of the Chapelle du Roi.

The first disc contains a selection of music by Orlando Gibbons, with a mixture of anthems, verse anthems and the hymns and songs, these latter assembled into coherent sequences. All are gravely beautiful but to my ears lack the élan that more recent performers bring. Even O Clap Your Hands comes over as rather sombre. There is however some quietly beautiful singing here. Speeds are generally on the deliberate side. If you compare Philip Ledger’s 1982 recording of Gibbons’ music with the choir of Kings College Cambridge, then speeds are faster with more rhythmic pointing. Wulstan seems to relish slow and smoothly produced beauty.

The second disc is devoted to the early Tudor composer John Sheppard. It is Sheppard’s music with its startlingly high treble lines that I associate with the sound-world of the Clerkes of Oxenford. They sing Sheppard’s Missa Cantate and one of his Responds, a substantial work in its own right. Here the high treble line is given a shape and clarity that belie its tessitura, testimony to the amount of training that must have been required. The Respond, by contrast, is sung with counter-tenors on the top line, providing a vibrant rich texture.

The final disc starts with Tallis’s Missa puer natus est, written for Queen Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain. The choir sings a shapely plainchant introit before launching into the Gloria. Here the top part is by no means as might be expected for the period. It is written for the unusual combination of seven voices. The work’s sober mien lends credence to the idea that it may well have been written for the service for the absolution of England: undertaken to return the country to Roman Catholicism. Wulstan performs all the surviving music, Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei complete, plus the surviving torso of the Credo. Wulstan is sober and steady, even the Hosannas are controlled rather than lively, but this befits the work’s penitential nature. The conclusion to the Agnus Dei is mesmerisingly beautiful.

Alistair Dixon’s recording of the mass with the Chapelle du Roi puts rather more air around the singers and his ensemble seems slimline in comparison. Dixon’s speeds are faster, Wulstan is again steadier with less rhythmic pointing. Both use the same sort of pure clean soprano lines.

The final disc finishes with Robert White’s Lamentations of Jeremiah. Here we return to the high treble part. The effect blends gravity and beauty with moments of delicacy and daringly quiet singing.

The booklet includes brief notes but no texts.

You can probably find more recent recordings which have a better surface gloss and technical ability. That said, every library shelf should include some of Wulstan’s recordings of early Tudor polyphony. I have used the word ‘astonishing’ already, but the performances on this set merit its use again. These performances influenced generations of British performers and they still sound amazing.

Robert Hugill

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