The return of the wonderfully disciplined travelling choir from The Sixteeen, under the direction of Harry Christophers. They are on tour travelling with religious music of the early modern period often linked with the new spirituality that became prevalent in what we now call the spanish netherlands. Josquin, Bommel and Lassus.
It will seem ungracious but it was difficult to share the enthusiasms for the works when they were not given much of a history by way of explanation. The programme notes were interesting, in that thy covered the ground, but in way that did not shed much understanding (to me anywhere) on the music as music
If only Harry Christophers had been able to spend two or three minutes speaking about and illustrating what was coming next and how it linked to what had gone before.
The audience loved the sound but I was uncertain how much they understood of the context of the music - or in fact cared about it. For me, the most satisfactory part of the evening - apart from the sociability and the glass of wine - was the men of the choir singing the monody in the alternate versus of the two versions of the magnificat. The rest of the evening left me thinking about how necessary was the reform of music for the liturgy at the reformation. The Council of Trent does not feature well in my circles but in this matter its insistence on simple, note for word, music was important even if it did not get adopted all that well.
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