Massive pieces of Tudor polyphony, sung with captivating intensity by The Sixteen and Harry Christophers as their 2014 Choral Pilgrimage comes to Durham Cathedral.
It’s a long way from modern Durham to renaissance Venice, from a cold winter evening in a small northern English city to a spring morning in one of the richest and most powerful cities the world has ever seen – but Paul McCreesh’s imaginative reconstruction of a Venetian Doge’s coronation mass made the leap almost instantaneous.
In my notes for this evening’s concert by Renaissance, a chamber choir founded by the young singer, conductor and composer Ben Rowarth, one word kept recurring – “thoughtful”. This was a programme that had been carefully put together, and which was performed without any unnecessary flashiness or attempts to impress.
A competition for young composers run by the National Centre for Early Music may perhaps, at first glance, sound like a contradiction, but the winning pieces, performed tonight by the Tallis Scholars in Durham Cathedral, acknowledged the glories of early polyphonic choral music whilst conveying their composers’ own distinct musical ideas.
The anthems and service settings of Charles Villiers Stanford form part of the core repertory of Anglican choral music; from the grandest cathedrals to the smallest parish churches, it’s probably safe to say that on any given Sunday, you will find Stanford’s music being sung somewhere.
This year, The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage features the work of just one man, Tomás Luis de Victoria, one of the greatest composers of church music of the Renaissance.
It has been nearly twenty years since the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek released their first recording, Officium, in which the austere harmonies of medieval sacred music sung by the male voice quartet were augmented by Garbarek’s beautiful, freewheeling saxophone melodies.
Visiting Durham Cathedral as part of a month long festival of the music of Sir John Stainer, the choir of Magdalen College Oxford put together an imaginative programme of English choral music, featuring music not just by Stainer but also composers who influenced him, his contemporaries and his successors.
In his introductory talk before The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage concert in Durham Cathedral, conductor Harry Christophers explained that the original idea of their Choral Pilgrimage series was to bring the glories of English church music back into the buildings for which the pieces had been written.
Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, Durham Cathedral and Sir John Eliot Gardiner – a glorious combination of music and architecture, in the hands of a man who made his name bringing the Vespers out of obscurity and into their well-deserved place in the concert repertoire.
