The Beverley early music festival is one of this country's best-kept musical secrets. An offshoot of the larger, international York early music festival, it boasts the best - and often the most unusual - of the current movers and shakers in early music. It also encourages front-rank performers such as vocal ensemble I Fagiolini to get out into the sticks and perform in obscure yet wonderful historic churches such as St Andrew's in Bainton.
This concert was a pertinent and illuminating comparison between sacred music from Cantiones Sacrae (by Byrd and Tallis) and secular madrigals by various composers. Director Robert Hollingworth sang alto, and kept his control of the performance discreet and minimal. For their part, the six singers injected considerable expertise and enthusiasm into their declamation of each text, whether it was Byrd's plaintive Miserere Mei or the florid and fiendish Attollite Portas. Tallis's O Nata Lux was a shorter, simpler homophonic exercise, yet its tender symmetry was enhanced by I Fagiolini's emphasis upon discords that are usually underplayed. The consort revealed detail and intimacy in this music that can be lost in conventional choral performance.
Byrd's consort songs were designed for solo voice and instruments, yet I Fagiolini's a cappella approach was lively, witty, and a world away from Tudor churchliness. Four captivating songs from The Triumphs of Orianna, a collection published in 1601 in praise of Elizabeth I, contrasted emotions including piercing sweetness, darkness and humorous energy. Any possible accusation that the English renaissance madrigal was merely an excuse for jolly fa-la-las was exploded.
The magnificent second half featured works by Tomkins, who was probably a pupil of Byrd. His finest songs were published long after the Stuart accession, while the musical glories of the golden age he had witnessed in his youth were fading fast. I Fagiolini confirmed his right to be elevated to the front rank of English composers with a moving performance of Too Much I Once Lamented - a tribute that Tomkins dedicated to Byrd, and composed in such an elegiac style that both his master and the passing of an age were mourned with equal pain and beauty.
