Thursday, 12 December 2024 at 6:30 pm
This Joyful Birth
York Early Music Festival
National Centre for Early Music, York, United Kingdom
Reviews
The Observer on Tenebrae
Andrew Clements, The Observer (15 March, 2018)
Also from Harmonia Mundi this month is a new recording of a much more familiar set of Tenebrae Responsories, by Tomás Luis de Victoria, composed in Rome more than 70 years before Lambert’s collection. These are transcendently beautiful choral settings, a sequence of 18 unaccompanied, four-part motets that are both profoundly restrained and dramatically compelling at the same time; they seem to belong in a totally different expressive space from Lambert’s solo version. Using 14 singers, Stile Antico’s performance – the settings for each day separated by plainsong – seems to capture that mix of austerity and contained intensity perfectly.