The Sixteen: The Deer’s Cry
Coro COR16140. 66’52
Tallis/Byrd: Miserere nostri
Tallis: When Jesus went into Simon the Pharisee’s house.
Byrd: Diliges Dominum, Christe qui Lux Miserere mihi, Domini, Tribue Domine, Emendemus in melius, O Lux beata Trinitas, Ad Dominum cum tribularer, Laetentur coeli;
Pärt: The Deer’s Cry, Nunc dimittis The Woman With The Alabaster Box;
If you are mathematically minded, this might be the CD for you. Some of the most complex examples of English contrapuntal wizardry from Tallis and Byrd are balanced by more recent, but equally complex and evocative music, from the Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt. As the programme note explains, “Here, Tallis and Byrd meet Pärt on common ground”, although at times, Pärt’s music can sound earlier than that of Tallis and Byrd with its sense of mediaeval structure and texture. This CD will whet your appetite for The Sixteen’s 2016 Choral Pilgrimage, when you can experience this music performed live in some of the most beautiful venues the UK can offer.
The CD opens with Byrd’s extraordinary eight-voice Diliges Dominum, a palindrome (or ‘crab canon’) that sounds exactly the same (words excepted) whether performed forwards or backwards. Almost certainly an act of pure Continue reading
After a short tour in The Netherlands, the Tallis Scholars brought their programme of music by Thomas Tallis, Arvo Pärt and John Sheppard to St John’s, Smith Square as part of the SJSS 30th annual Christmas festival. Tallis’s Missa Puer natus est nobis (based on the introit for the Mass of Christmas Day) were threaded through the programme, but it opened with Arvo Pärt’s 1988 Sieben Magnificat Antiphonen and 1989 Magnificat in recognition of Pärt’s 80th anniversary. 
Arvo Pärt provided a link between the earlier B’Rock/Julia Doyle concert and the later evening programme of a capella ‘Songs from the Northern Lands’ given by the Choir of Royal Holloway College. They opened with Pärt’s mesmerising Magnificat, the verse sections evolving around a high and long-held soprano note, and contrasting with fuller-textured passages. A similar drone note was at the core of Rihards Dubra’s ‘A child’s prayer’, again with a soprano solo. Vytautas Miškinis’s Oi šala, šala uses the ‘sh’ sound of ‘šala’ to invoke the sense of shivering in the frost. It is performed with three remote female voices (with noisy shoes!) echoing each other, a soprano solo and an almost inaudible little bell that reinforced the end of phrases. 
Andrew Benson-Wilson : Early Music Reviews + 