Cardinall’s Musick, St John’s - review
The Cardinall’s Musick are one of our most distinguished vocal ensembles, specialising in music of the Renaissance. This year they have been touring programmes of Byrd’s Latin music and there was good reason to expect their performance of the great Mass for Five Voices would be an outstanding one.
But while it certainly contained admirable things, it was not everything one might have hoped. The ensemble fielded eight singers for this all-Byrd concert. That’s not quite enough for two to a part in the Mass and the two sopranos and two tenors had to take a line each to themselves, with only the altos and basses doubling.
While the sopranos were able to hold their own, many important features of the tenor lines failed to emerge with sufficient clarity — at least in the back half of the hall.
The general sound-world was faithfully created, with sonority taking precedence over diction, but only a melancholy Sanctus created much of an expressive effect. Especially perfunctory was the Credo, which was taken at an extraordinary lick. Andrew Carwood is an experienced, knowledgeable choral director and doubtless has good scholarly reasons for his tempo choices but much of this section passed in a flash: not until the lines about Christ’s crucifixion did anything make an impression.
The sections of the Mass were interpolated with motets for the Propers appropriate for Christmas, while in the second half a sequence of eight motets was introduced from the platform by Carwood in an engaging and informative manner.
If one could accept two boldly contrasted sopranos (one plangent, one mellifluous), voicing and intonation were generally excellent.
