In its latest
collection, Heavenly Harmonies, Stile Antico
revives the centuries-old music of William Byrd and Thomas
Tallis
It’s not
often that a disc of Renaissance church music makes it into
the Billboard classical charts (amid the
usual compilations, crossover titles, and obligatory Andrea
Bocelli releases). Still, that is precisely what
happened when the English early music ensemble Stile
Antico’s first recording, Music for Compline,
in 2007, surged its way to the top. In Heavenly
Harmonies, the group's highly anticipated second
album, Stile Antico once again explores the world of
Elizabethan sacred music, but this time with an unusual and
fascinating twist.
The disc compares
and contrasts two very different kinds of music making
that were, somewhat uneasily, coexisting during the reign of
Elizabeth I. Nine Anglican hymn tunes by Thomas Tallis
are paired with several Latin motets by William Byrd
-- each one coming after the other on the disc --the
former in the spare, simple new style of the Reformed
Protestant church, the latter in the more florid,
deeply textured "old style" of Roman Catholicism.
William Byrd
lived in a dangerous world for a practicing Catholic.
Although the observance of Catholicism was not officially
outlawed or overtly persecuted during
Elizabeth’s reign (she was famously quoted
saying that she did not wish to "make windows into
men’s souls"), most Catholics worshipped in
secret. Byrd, although he enjoyed a privileged
relationship with his monarch, chose texts for his
Latin choral works that reflected the precarious position
English Catholics found themselves in after the death
of Mary Tudor. Feelings of peril, persecution, and
self-reprehension are found everywhere in these
dramatic, deeply moving works.
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