The choir of King’s
College, Cambridge had been singing divine service for well over a century when
William Byrd assumed his first major post at Lincoln Cathedral around 1563, and
his music is woven through the choir’s lengthy discography including recordings
of the Masses under Sir David Willcocks. Those landmarks already spoken for,
Stephen Cleobury stakes his claim on a clutch of Latin motets artfully arranged
to chart the onward march of the liturgical year.
It’s a neat idea, though not without some musical drawbacks. By the time
four feisty motets have signalled Advent and Candlemas, a little Lenten
soul-searching is long overdue; and Easter through Ascension to Whitsun
slaloms through a similarly bracing trajectory. Perhaps some of it is
exacerbated by Cleobury’s often driven direction – as if to distance himself
from the Willcocks tradition. Rorate caeli unleashes not so much a wave of
sound as a tsunami. The textures sound congested though, and the beseeching
text metamorphoses into an urgent command. (Laudibus in sanctis, it must be
said, musters a more cogent immediacy.)
Rather too often the application of a broad brush blunts Byrd’s
expressive intentions, so that the latter stages of Ave verum never quite elicit
the plaintiveness wrapped around the repeating ‘misereres’; and when the choral
scholars alone tackle Ne irascaris, Domine/civitas sancti tui, while the
burnished bottom-heavy opening trembles with penitence, the heartrending lament
for Jerusalem doesn’t get past the notes to nail Byrd’s subtext bemoaning the
plight of Catholicism in a Protestant land.
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