“This new recording is something special.  Whether it’s because of the sheer experience of having sung so much of Byrd’s music as to have assimilated his musical language utterly, or whether it’s simply the raw musicianship and cultivated intelligence of the performers, thre’s a clarity and intensity in each verse that is spine-tingling.  In his excellent booklet notes, Carwood rightly mentions a moment in the Magnificat where Byrd scatters the proud ‘not only “in their hearts” but audibly in the music’.   Here, as elsewhere, Byrd’s setting is realised with the kind of skill and conviction that moves rather than simply amazes.” (Robert Levett, International Record Review)

“The 10 voices of the Cardinall’s Musick launch into the opening of Byrd’s The Great Service – “O come, let us sing unto the Lord” – with a soaring joyfulness and clarity that sustains throughout this large-scale and elaborate work. Andrew Carwood and his group have won countless accolades for their series of Byrd’s Latin sacred music. In this Anglican work, they achieve the same outstanding level of musicianship. The (female) sopranos have strength and purity at the top but an effective lightness, too, closer to the sound of boy trebles. The full ensemble tone is bold and energetic. Also includes Unto the Hills Mine Eyes I Lift (1589) and four pieces from Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets (1611).” (Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian)

“This new recording is something special.  Whether it’s because of the sheer experience of having sung so much of Byrd’s music as to have assimilated his musical language utterly, or whether it’s simply the raw musicianship and cultivated intelligence of the performers, thre’s a clarity and intensity in each verse that is spine-tingling.  In his excellent booklet notes, Carwood rightly mentions a moment in the Magnificat where Byrd scatters the proud ‘not only “in their hearts” but audibly in the music’.   Here, as elsewhere, Byrd’s setting is realised with the kind of skill and conviction that moves rather than simply amazes.” (Robert Levett, International Record Review)

“The 10 voices of the Cardinall’s Musick launch into the opening of Byrd’s The Great Service – “O come, let us sing unto the Lord” – with a soaring joyfulness and clarity that sustains throughout this large-scale and elaborate work. Andrew Carwood and his group have won countless accolades for their series of Byrd’s Latin sacred music. In this Anglican work, they achieve the same outstanding level of musicianship. The (female) sopranos have strength and purity at the top but an effective lightness, too, closer to the sound of boy trebles. The full ensemble tone is bold and energetic. Also includes Unto the Hills Mine Eyes I Lift (1589) and four pieces from Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets (1611).” (Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian)

In the first half they performed Byrd’s glorious four-part Mass with the addition of texts for Easter Sunday. In the second half we heard a series of other pieces composed for the Easter liturgy, using various combinations of voices.

Byrd was a Catholic when adherence to that faith in England could cost you your life. His Mass setting dates from 1582–83 and would only have been performed in private. The music is imbued with a sense of darkness and persecution. The Agnus Dei is a moving appeal for release. The Easter Sunday settings, in contrast, are vivid and exuberant. There is expressive word painting in these pieces, for example the elaborate ending of the Gradual and the vocal exchanges depicting the conflict between death and life in Victimae paschali.

The lovely six-part setting of Haec Dies which opened the second half is well known but some of the other works the group performed are less often heard. One particular curiosity was a processional Psalm setting to which Byrd contributed three verses, with John Sheppard and William Mundy providing the other sections. Byrd was a teenager when he wrote this. The motet Deus in Adjutorium, which closed the advertised programme, brought us back to the mood of Passiontide with its appeal for help in time of trouble. As an encore the group sang Tallis’s Te lucis ante terminum.

The Cardinall’s Musick make an exquisite sound. The ensemble’s performance throughout showed consistent attention to Byrd’s colouring of the text. Their award-winning recordings of the complete Latin works of Byrd are available on Hyperion.

With Sunday marking the beginning of Passiontide, the first half was devoted to Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices, interpolating the St John Passion intended for Good Friday. Familiar as we are with Bach’s Passions, the simplicity and directness of Byrd’s Latin setting has its own implicit drama.

Director Andrew Carwood sang the Evangelist narrator, with bass James Birchall the grave, compassionate voice of Jesus, and tenor William Balkwill sang the various roles of Synagoga, notably the sympathetic then frustrated Pilate. Most remarkable was Byrd’s treatment of the crowd, with their angry and increasingly bloodthirsty outburts. The motet Plorans Ploravit was also inserted between the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei of the mass. Its mournful tone was palpably present, but so, too, were the political barbs that Byrd as a Popish recusant – refusing to attend Church of England services – defiantly wove into his scores. Carwood’s occasional reduction of the texture to single voices, in contrast to the resonant polyphony of the eight singers together, always ensured primacy of the text.

The second half’s six sacred motets continued the penitential theme. In all, the expressions of grief were subtly weighted to heighten the sense of progress towards consolation. Yet it was the poignant repetitions in the Ave Verum Corpus that had the most breathtaking beauty.

This performance of the sacred music of William Byrd was clear, bright and forthright

From now until the end of the year The Cardinall’s Musick will be performing the sacred music of William Byrd around the UK. During the religious strife at the end of the 16th century, when other Catholic composers were fleeing to the continent, Byrd was always loyal to his country and the tour will be visiting a number of the places that he knew and where his music was heard.

The starting point was in London at Wigmore Hall on Monday. Over two seasons the hall is offering its own Byrd series, shared between The Cardinall’s Musick and counterpart Stile Antico, and it was heartening to see a capacity audience responding both to the Wigmore’s imaginative programming and an English composer whose pre-eminence in his field is often undervalued.

Throughout the evening Andrew Carwood, director of music at St Paul’s Cathedral and joint founder of The Cardinall’s Musick, put the music in context. It is impossible to recreate for modern audiences the atmosphere of religious persecution in which Byrd’s music was performed during the later years of Elizabeth I’s reign, but a running historical commentary does help.

The Great Service provided an ongoing thread through the programme. This was one of Byrd’s most impressive achievements, composed on an ambitious scale with up to 10 voices interweaving their separate parts. The romantic mist that used to envelop performances of Byrd and his contemporaries a few decades ago has now been thoroughly blown away and The Cardinall’s Musick were clear, bright and forthright.

In between came shorter pieces, some from Byrd’s last collection, composed in 1611 for performance in the home. Given their intimate scale (three to six voices) and intricate rhythmic interplay, these must have been written more for the pleasure of the singers than an audience, but the sheer joy of the music can still hold listeners in its thrall. Best of all was “O Lord make thy servant Elizabeth our Queen”, a loving tribute to the monarch who was probably not only the Catholic Byrd’s artistic patron, but also his protector. It seems Elizabeth knew great music when she heard it.

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/pdf/5583/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/9129555/William-Byrd-could-ruffle-feathers-in-a-contest-to-find-our-finest-composer.html

“This is music of the highest quality which has the power to move both the heart and the mind. I find William Byrd’s music to be the most impassioned of all composers across Europe and into the New World. This touring programme gives The Cardinall’s Musick an opportunity to take Byrd around the country, to showcase his passion and to place him in context as the most important musician of the Tudor age.”  Andrew Carwood

Fabrice Fitch, writing in Gramophone, says “Carwood and his singers make a case for Parsons… it’s worth buying this disc just for this object lesson in word painting….  The Cardinall’s Musick are at their best in this repertoire, and their performances have confidence and authority…  Parsons certainly deserves the hearing that Carwood’s musicians afford us, so this addition to the catalogue is very valuable”.  Editor James Inverne has gone further, making the disc ‘Editor’s Choice’ in the November issue.

In BBC Music Magazine, Kate Bolton give the recording 5 stars, saying: “Having previously explored English polyphony at the extremes of the 16th century – Cornysh, Fayrfax and Ludford at the beginning, Byrd at the end – The Cardinall’s Musick now bridges the gap with the enigmatic mid-century composer Robert Parsons.  He lived through some of the most turbulent years of England’s religious and political history, and his life was tragically cut short when he drowned at a young age.  So, while there are some serene works here, with soaring melismatic lines that hark back to the music of the Eton Choirbook, most of these pieces are sonorously scored for low voices and peppered with bitter dissonances, giving them a dark, plangent quality.  Director Andrew Carwood draws earthy, visceral performances; the ensemble’s virile sound and Parsons’s sinewy polyphony are a far cry from what some critics describe as the ‘whitewashed’, English choral tradition.  Carwood and his singers highlight the inherent drama of Parsons’s style, notably in O bone Jesu, with its changing textures, brilliant canons and expressive dissonances.  The basses resonate magnificently in Peccantem me quotidie, in Holy Lord God Almighty and in the hauntingly austere Libera me, while, by contrast, the monumental Magnificat sounds radiant.  Perhaps the crowning glory of the disc is the final Ave Maria, the slow and poignant unfolding of which echoes long in the memory.  Hyperion’s detailed recording, swathed in the glowing acoustic of the Fitzalan Chapel, Arundel Castle, enhances these seraphic performances.”

Rebecca Taverner from Choir and Organ notes that “the recording has deep perspective and clarity with the sequence of works, mostly scored for low voices, given fluid impassioned readings, with vibrant bass sonorities providing and almost instrumental foundation… tonal beauty, impeccable ensemble and blend”.