The Independent at the Wigmore Hall

Reviews

The Independent at the Wigmore Hall

Michael Church, The Independent (22 December, 2012)

To a full house, and broadcast live on Radio 3, the hugely popular Stile Antico a cappella group delivered an appropriately seasonal programme of motets and masses by Tallis and Byrd.

As Rick Jones observed in his programme essay, the very different political and religious climates in which these composers worked were reflected in their music. Tallis wrote his Missa Puer natus est nobis at a time when the Latin mass was freely enjoyed, but under the Elizabethan persecution Byrd’s motets had to be sung in secrecy: imprisonment was the least a Catholic priest could expect if discovered celebrating mass, with a disgustingly obscene public butchery being a not uncommon punishment. Tallis’s music is opulent and expansive, while Byrd’s has a clandestine intensity suggesting furtive meetings in secret rooms. Jones drew an apt analogy between the coded motifs in Byrd’s music and those in Shostakovich’s works.

Stile Antico did full justice to these composers’ contrasting styles, revelling in the muscular dissonances of Tallis and in the intricate magnificence of Byrd’s polyphonies; the Old Testament lament – “Zion is made a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation” – came over with dark seriousness, while their encore, Orlando Gibbons’s “Hosanna to the Son of David”, rang to the heavens in pure jubilation. This group don’t go in for the theatrics of some of their competitors, but their wonderfully sustained and full-blooded sound has a narcotic effect, slowing even the listener’s heart-rate to a healthy level.