Journeys to the New World
Hispanic Sacred Music from the 16th & 17th centuries
The Queen’s Six
Signum Classics SIGCD626. 66’23
The Queen’s Six are all based at Windsor Castle where they are Lay Clerks at St George’s Chapel. They promote themselves as providing a “unique style of entertainment” with a repertoire that “extends far beyond the reach of the choir stalls: from austere early chant, florid Renaissance polyphony, lewd madrigals and haunting folk songs, to upbeat Jazz and Pop arrangements”. Perhaps fortunately, on this recording they remain firmly in the choir stalls for some Renaissance New World polyphony dating from the mid-16th century to c1700.
For their Spitalfields Festival debut, The Marian Consort brought their programme ‘Christmas with the Shepherds’ (based on last year’s CD release) to St Leonard’s, Shoreditch at the conclusion of a national tour. In a very well conceived and planned programme, they traced the influence of Jean Mouton on composers of the following century, notably Cristóbel de Morales, whose Missa Quaeramus cum pastoribus formed the nucleus of the programme. After the opening motet Alma Redemptoris Mater by Victoria, the latest of the composers represented, we heard Mouton’s motet Quaeramus cum pastoribus, a work that stayed in the repertoire of the Sistine Chapel for more than 100 years and survives in 27 manuscripts and printed sources now to be found as far apart as Aberdeen and Guatemala. It is the best known of a series of ‘Noë’ motets found in the Sistine Chapel archive, the result of the Medici Pope Leo X whose after-dinner entertainment 
Andrew Benson-Wilson : Early Music Reviews + 