Rating: 4/5
Review:
Lovely sound, but...
I realise that this is tantamount to sacrilege, but I'm not
all that keen on some of The Sixteen's recordings. Their early work like the Taverner series or
The Eton Choirbook discs were fantastic, but more recently they have sometimes,
to my ears at least, lost a little of the important emotional edge in favour of
a smoothly blended sound. This disc,
lovely though it is, is a case in point.
The works here are wonderful. The majority of these pieces are motets by
William Byrd, with three pieces by Arvo Pärt and two by Thomas Tallis. It's a fine programme, and the parallels
between Byrd and Pärt are well drawn, but I'm not sure how well it works
overall.
The Sixteen sing beautifully, as ever. They are a superb choir, made up of some of
the world's finest singers of this repertoire and they are technically
impeccable. The overall sound which
Harry Christophers creates is lovely to listen to throughout; it is warm,
impeccably blended and slightly muzzy in a resonant acoustic – and therein lies
some of my problem with this disc. It
lacks any real emotional edge when one is needed because everything lies under
a pleasant, slightly obscuring wash of sound.
It's a little like filming in soft-focus: it can be a lovely and
appropriate effect, but it won't do for everything. Even Tallis's sublime setting of Miserere
nostri sounds slightly muffled as those fabulous soprano lines rise to what
should be a spine-tingling climax.
This is a personal view, of course, it's not shared by a lot
of people and I don't want to be too critical but my rating is really 3.5 stars
rounded up to 4. The Sixteen are rightly
highly respected as one of the world's finest Renaissance ensembles; there is
much to like about this disc and many people will doubtless love it, but I will
be going back to my recordings by The Tallis Scholars, The Cardinall's Musick,
Alamire, Stile Antico and others and I can only give this a qualified
recommendation.
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