SMitF concert reviewed in Church Times

Reviews

SMitF concert reviewed in Church Times

Fiona Hill, Church Times (19 December, 2025)

SINGING without a conductor, as ever, the 12 members of Stile Antico delivered “A Spanish Nativity” at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, in December. It was a programme of unaccompanied Christmas choral music written during Spain’s Siglo de Oro, the 16th- and 17th-century Golden Age of Spanish culture.

The music divided neatly into two types. Villancicos, religious songs with a verse and refrain, by Cristóbal de Morales and Mateo Flecha el Viejo mingled with Tomas Luis de Victoria’s Ne timeas Maria (Be not afraid, Mary), and his Mass O magnum mysterium, based on his motet of the same name.

Victoria’s motet for four voices sets a text from the Christmas matins awestruck at the animals’ presence at Christ’s nativity and using Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary. It is set to long note values descending and ascending in leaps of a fifth, creating a sense of vastness, and the sense of wonder is heightened by the use of bare fifths. The music changes to a lilting triple time at the end as the choir sings “Alleluia!”, like a host of angels bursting into song.

The 1592 Mass has the same four-part scoring, reducing to three in the quiet Benedictus and splitting the sopranos in the Agnus Dei, creating a beautiful unison canon. Here, as throughout, Stile Antico caressed the counterpoint into a smooth ribbon of precisely phrased sound, showing an almost telepathic rapport as the singers made eye contact, emphasising the structure by tiny, distinct pauses marking important cadences.

A more robust but no less sincere spirituality illuminated the villanicos, Fernando de las Infantas’s Angelus ad pastores ait, Pedro Rimonte’s De la piel de sus ovejas. and Francisco Guerrero’s A un niño llorando. The singers brought out the bouncing jollity of Flecha el Viejo’s Ríu Ríu Chíu, with five excellent male soloists in the verses, and his reverent but amusing El Jubilate, in which the Virgin addresses Original Sin as “Poltrón françoy” (French fool). Morales’s lengthy setting of Matthew’s account of Christ’s birth, Cum natus esset, was never allowed to drag, and the careful interplay between the voices added a sense of narrative urgency to the familiar story.

The singers even showed off their sound grasp of Nahautl, the native language of Mexico, in Hernando Franco’s Sancta Maria, e un il huicac (Holy Mary, Queen of Heaven).