Stile Antico

Tonight’s concert brings together many of our favorite works, and provides a fascinating window onto the different styles of sacred choral music which flourished around Renaissance Europe.

We begin with music by William Byrd, who was perhaps England’s greatest Renaissance composer. Byrd chose a dangerous course amid the religious turmoil of the Reformation: even as he served in Queen Elizabeth I’s Protestant Chapel Royal, he became the musical mouthpiece of the underground Catholic community, publishing a series of bitter Latin motets whose texts unmistakably respond to the plight of his fellow Catholics. One such work is Exsurge Domine: here the frustrated Psalmist demands that God rouse himself to help his persecuted people. Byrd’s music positively bristles with righteous indignation.

The next three works are all appropriate to the Christmas season. The first, Audivi vocem de caelo, is by the pre-Reformation English composer, John Taverner; it alternates passages of plainsong and choral polyphony, and was almost certainly intended for performance by upper voices—perhaps in response to the ‘wise virgins’ mentioned in the text. We follow it with A un niño llorando, a villancico (a Spanish-language, folk-like carol) by Francisco Guerrero, describing the visit of the Magi to the stable in an irrepressible dance meter. A similar spirit is found in Michael Praetorius’ vivacious Ein kind geborn, whose texture builds progressively from the two voices heard at the opening to six parts in the climactic verses.

Thomas Tallis was William Byrd’s close friend and colleague, even standing as godfather to Byrd’s son, also named Thomas. The two collaborated on the first ever book of music to be printed in England, the Cantiones Sacrae of 1575. Tallis’ In manus tuas appears in that volume; a setting of words appropriate for the late-night service of Compline, it is a perfect example of the older composer’s exquisitely balanced style. A particular highlight is the piquant dissonance at cadence points—once condemned by a horrified Victorian editor as “an intolerably harsh effect.” By contrast, O Praise the Lord by Thomas Tomkins, written for twelve solo voices, is a riot of chaotic energy.

Three pieces appropriate to Holy Week follow, beginning with Orlando Gibbons’ lively Hosanna to the Son of David, which deftly captures the exuberance of the crowd which welcomed Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. John Sheppard’s I give you a new commandment for lower voices sets words from the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday; written in the early stages of the Reformation, its austerity reflects the wishes of Thomas Cranmer that music should not be “full of notes, but, as near as may be, for every syllable a note; so that it may be sung distinctly and devoutly.” The climax of the Holy Week liturgy is the set of Tenebrae services for which the Spanish composer Tomás Luís de Victoria wrote his famous Tenebrae Responsories in 1585. Recessit pastor noster is a key moment in the sequence, simultaneously lamenting the death of Christ and anticipating his eventual triumph.

It is rare that we can pinpoint exactly the occasion for which a piece of Renaissance music was written, but the festive Jubilate Deo by Cristóbal de Morales is a happy exception: it was composed to celebrate a (short-lived) peace treaty between Charles V of Spain and Francis I of France in 1538. The motet was commissioned by Morales’ employer, Pope Paul III, and it is he who is credited in the text with brokering the peace. Morales includes a ‘cantus firmus’ in the tenor line, consisting of repetitions of the word ‘Gaudeamus’—‘rejoice’—firstly in slow notes, and then, towards the end of the piece, at double tempo.

Orlando Gibbons’ irrepressible setting of Psalm 47, O clap your hands, has a strange history: two accounts relate that it was written for his friend William Heyther to present in order to supplicate for his DMus at Oxford in 1622. It seems unlikely that this was intended as genuine subterfuge; rather, Gibbons’s anthem probably served to fulfil a formality, since Heyther’s was an honorary degree. We pair it with a beautiful late work by William Byrd, Retire my soul, whose autumnal text seems highly appropriate for a composer by then in his seventies.

Flemish musicians were some of the most renowned and sought-after composers of the Renaissance, and often found employment abroad. Giaches de Wert and Josquin Des Prez both spent much of their careers working in Italy; de Wert was in charge of music at the court in Ferrara, where a young Claudio Monteverdi was among his employees. His brief Gaudete in Domino unfolds as a single burst of energy. Josquin was the first international superstar composer, working chiefly in Milan and Rome. His five-part Salve Regina was particularly admired by his contemporaries for its technical accomplishment: one of the inner parts is entirely pre-composed, consisting exclusively of ostinato repetitions of the word ‘Salve’ at pre-determined intervals, while the highest part is a close paraphrase of a plainsong. Despite these twin constraints—akin to composing with one hand tied behind his back— Josquin manages to create a motet full of variety and color, by turns muscularly rhythmic and tenderly reflective.

Between these two works we sing a particular group favorite: Ego flos campi by Clemens non Papa. It was probably written for a community of nuns at ‘s-Hertogenbosch; their motto ‘sicut lilium inter spinas’ is heard clearly, twice over, at the centre of the motet. The music is characterised by crystalline, slow-moving harmony, never straying far from the warmth of the tonic chord; the effect is akin to admiring a jewel from every possible angle.

We finish with something completely different: a work commissioned for Stile Antico in 2014 by Huw Watkins. The Phoenix and the Turtle sets words by Shakespeare, and describes the funeral rites of a phoenix and turtle dove, symbols of perfection and devoted love. The poem is clearly intended as an allegory of some sort, and it has been suggested that the two birds might represent two Catholic martyrs, Anne and Roger Line. If that is correct, then the ‘bird of loudest lay’ mentioned in the first stanza might well represent William Byrd. Watkins cloaks Shakespeare’s dense words in music of propulsive drive and lyrical beauty.

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