Harry Christophers and his group have been making their choral pilgrimages every year since the beginning of the century, spending each summer touring the UK’s cathedrals and other major churches with a carefully themed selection of unaccompanied choral music. During that time, the choice of works has been wide-ranging – last year’s programme was devoted to the Spanish golden age composers Francisco Guerrero and Alfonso Lobo, for instance. But the music of the English Renaissance has always remained the staple ingredient in Christophers’ programming, as it is this year, when William Byrd and his teacher Thomas Tallis make up the bulk of the Choral Pilgrimage.
But the title of The Sixteen’s tour, The Deer’s Cry, is taken from a piece by Arvo Pärt, a 2007 setting of a fifth-century incantation thought to have been written by St Patrick. It is one of three works by the Estonian composer that are performed alongside Tudor music as Christophers makes connections across the centuries between Pärt and particularly Byrd. Both composers were victims of persecution: Byrd, a Catholic, was writing sacred works in a country where only Anglicanism could officially be celebrated; Pärt began his career during the 1960s in the Soviet Union, where composing religious music was strongly discouraged.
Even without such historical inks, however, Pärt’s music sits comfortably alongside these composers, because so much of it is timeless. Its language, which celebrates tonal harmony in a totally unselfconscious way, is never a million miles away from that of Byrd and Tallis. Pärt’s structural devices, too, recall the English composers’ cornucopia of canons, retrogrades and inversions.
In fact, at times during The Sixteen’s concert in Christ Church Cathedral one could have done with more contrast – it might have benefitted from an item or two that was more stylistically different from the Tudor music. Nevertheless, Christophers has designed the programme very carefully. Pärt’s The Woman with the Alabaster Box, is contrasted with Tallis’s When Jesus Went, which sets the same story from Matthew’s gospel. The second half of the concert is built around Pärt’s Nunc Dimittis, which climaxes in a radiant example of his trademark tintinnabulation, and Byrd’s massive six-part motet Tribue, Domine, in which textures constantly switch between all 18 singers and a much reduced choir. That in turn mirrors Byrd’s eight-part Ad Dominum cum Tribularer, with its swaths of close-packed imitation, which ends the first half.
There is nothing bland or homogenised about the choral sound, and Christophers encourages a sharper, more acidulated edge when a contrapuntal line needs more definition. But his choir can also produce wonderfully smooth sustained textures, in which miraculously they make every word clear at the same time.
• The Sixteen’s 2016 Choral Pilgrimage continues until 3 November. Next concert at Croydon Minster, London, on 11 May. Box office: 01904 651485.
