Although at first glance William Byrd’s music seems to have fared pretty well on disc, it’s only a relative few works that get most of the attention: the three-, four-, and five-part masses, the motet Ave verum corpus, and a handful of service music and selected anthems. With its “The Byrd Edition”, now on Volume 6, Andrew Carwood and The Cardinall’s Musick have been working to fill the substantial gaps in the Byrd discography. This latest release contains Holy Week and Easter music found in Byrd’s Gradualia, the composer’s two-volume anthology of Mass Propers for the church year. The dominant work, temporally speaking, is the 35-minute-long setting of St. John’s passion narrative, which consists mostly of solo-chanted dialog with occasional interjections by a chorus (the “people”). While this is an important and liturgically significant component of Byrd’s Latin church music, for some listeners the long passages of chant and the overall length of the piece will become tedious–often true for recorded performances of service music, heard totally removed from its intended context.
For choral enthusiasts, the heart of the disc is the Mass Propers for Easter Day, with its marvelous Victimae paschali laudes sequence (followed by the almost humorous “earth-shaking” offertory, Terra tremuli), and two single works, the five-part motet Plorans plorabit and the sublime four-part processional antiphon Christus resurgens. Although these last two pieces appear on an excellent recording by the Cambridge Singers (Collegium), most of the music on this program is not readily available anywhere else. The singing is first rate, as it has been for most of the series so far (the three Masses on Vol. 5 were uneven), with an apparently concerted effort toward expression of the texts as well as attending to the sheer beauty of the vocal lines. The acoustics of Arundel Castle’s Fitzalan Chapel give sufficient resonance while preserving the intricate detail of even the more complex pieces. Byrd enthusiasts will grab this without delay, but, because of the substantially service-oriented nature of the program, if you’re new to this composer, I’d begin with Volume 4 of this series (Cantiones Sacrae 1575), or with the Cambridge Singers’ and Tallis Scholars’ own compilations. [4/8/2001]
