Search - William Byrd, David Skinner, Andrew Carwood :: The William Byrd Edition, Vol. 3: Early Latin Church Music & Propers for the Epiphany

The Byrd Edition just keeps getting better..........

Edward Breen | London, UK Great Britain | 05/01/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Cardinall's Musick are quite different from the usual choral sound that one would normally associate with a disc devoted to the works of William Byrd. The most remarkable difference is that this choir are actually singing! The sound is passionate and expressive, two qualities that are sadly lacking from a lot of the early music that is currently in vogue. It has been long fashionable for choirs to sing Byrd like oscilloscopes, but Andrew Carwood destroys that myth with this exceptional disc on the ASV label. In the men's voice singing, the sound is intimate, well blended and impassioned. However, the whole choir opens up when the sopranos Rebecca Outram and Carys Lane join in track 2. The choir sings with a collective intelligence that amplifies the excellent editions created for them by David Skinner. There are a few examples of daring and clever use of musica ficta that the singers execute with alarming ease and without any sensationalist tactics. I wonder if this blend can be attributed to the vocal abilities of the choir, not only are they obviously fine singers but Andrew Carwood is letting them use their natural vibrato so you never feel that they are holding something back as is so often the case with recordings of polyphony. The result is deeply devotional and rather moving. My abiding memory of this disc has to be the final track, Quomodo Cantabimus a8" which is a motet composed by William Byrd for his Spanish counterpart, Philip De Monte which is about as good as polyphony gets. The interaction between the Alto (Robin Blaze) and the sopranos is fantastic and thirds and fifths are so well in tune that they are zinging all over the place. To sum up, this is a recording that withstands revisiting time and time again. I would thoroughly recommend it."

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

MR N DAKIN | London United Kingdom | 09/10/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I agree with everything that Mr Breen, the first reviewer of this record, has said. And like him, I find the great 8-part canonic motet "Quomodo Cantabimus" (Byrd's reply to Philippe de Monte's personal gift of "Super flumina Babylonis", featured on the previous track) simply wonderful, both in its own right and as an outstanding performance. "Sublime" is an overworked word, and I hesitate to use it; but in this context, for once, it seems wholly appropriate. Here is Byrd's consummate musical art. Here, too, is the cry of Recusant England, the community of which Byrd was so staunch a member. How indeed will the Lord's Song be sung "in terra aliena"? - in a land no longer familiar, hostile to the old pieties of Catholicism? From the other side of the Channel, the cosmopolitan De Monte poses the question in passionate, urgent, essentially Counter-Reformation terms: Byrd's reply is wonderfully serene (and complex). I sometimes think that this is the finest piece of church music ever written in England ..."

Heavenly

J. Kingan | USA | 05/21/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"We really miss out these days! You have to go to one of these high Episcopal "bells and smells" outfits to hear the Mass sung!
If you want to raise your spirits I highly recommend this cd. William Byrd wrote incredibly beautiful and spiritual music, and his own personal story is inspiring as well."