MEDIA VITA – Music by BYRD, GIBBONS, SHEPPARD, TALLIS and WEELKES
The Tudor Consort, directed by Michael Stewart
ORLANDO GIBBONS – O Lord in Thy wrath
THOMAS WEELKES – Laboravi in gemitu meo
THOMAS TALLIS – Lamentations of Jeremiah I & II
WILLIAM BYRD – Plorans plorabit
JOHN SHEPPARD – Media vita in morte sumus
The Tudor Consort
Sopranos: Geneviève Gates-Panneton, Lydia Joyce, Erin King, Jane McKinlay, Rebecca Stanton,
Chelsea Whitfield
Altos: Christine Argyle, Andrea Cochrane, Alexandra Granville, Helene Page, Kassandra Wang,
Alex Woodhouse-Appleby
Tenors: Joshua Long, Philip Roderick, Richard Taylor, Axel Tie
Basses: Brian Hesketh, Joshua Jamieson, Frazer MacDiarmid, Matthew Painter, Keith Small,
Thomas Whaley
Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul, Molesworth Street
Friday 18th April (Good Friday) 2025
What a joy to experience in the here-and-now music written hundreds of years previously with spacious acoustics and worshipful ambiences in mind as spectacularly presented by Wellington’s Cathedral of St. Paul, in Molesworth Street! In fact, the capital boasts a number of churches whose qualities would present a similar-but-different interplay between atmosphere and clarity of sound to that which we enjoyed on this occasion – but for sheer ambient beauty, the sounds made on this occasion by the Tudor Consort voices here in Wellington Cathedral would be hard to beat.
Tudor Consort Music Director Michael Stewart welcomed us to what he obviously considered something of a time-honoured ritual for all concerned, an Easter Concert, with repertoire chosen from the incredible storehouse of music written over the centuries for this particular occasion in the liturgical year – a tradition begun by a previous Consort Music Director, Alastair Carey in 2002, and continued by Stewart since his appointment in the role in 2007.
The two “flagship” works in the concert, Thomas Tallis’s two-part Lamentations of Jeremiah, and John Sheppard’s Media vita in morte sumus obviously gave each of the “halves” a singular kind of distinction and dominance through their sheer physical scale. Though the accompanying works by Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Weelkes and William Byrd were obviously of more modest dimensions their qualities unerringly took us into the ambient performance arena and suitably honed our receptivities for dealing with the more extended and complex works that followed.
Orlando Gibbons’ anthem “O Lord in thy wrath” opened the programme exquisitely, the tones beautifully balanced and the lines effortlessly shaped, with telling layerings in places like “Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am weak”, and “My soul is also sore troubled”. The final two lines further illustrate the singers’ control of emphases, the line “how long wilt thou punish me?” insistent, and the following “O save me for thy mercy’s sake” expiating the tones with heartfelt sensitivity. By comparison, Thomas Weelkes’ setting of different words from the same Psalm 6 seemed more insistent in its sorrowful reflection on the human condition. It seemed like a lament without solace, tapestried with constant lamentings, snow-capped by a gorgeous but insistent soprano line which drew others upwards to empathise and fall back again, the undulations wrapping around one another, simpatico, and taking some comfort in blending together and sharing sorrows in this vale of tears.
I’d heard both of the following pieces by Thomas Tallis and John Sheppard on recordings beforehand so I knew something of what to expect, taking particular comfort in the visceral collegiality of voices expressing (particularly in the Tallis work) remarkably apposite observations and feelings in a world that’s presently echoing in so many places and ways the strife and accompanying distress of the prophet’s visions. And of course, amid the consolations afforded by music of such beauty in places comes the agonising thought of the suffering being more present-day than prophetic, and the extent to which we can sublimate in art such agonies while people in places like Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine most ostensibly have no such recourse. The horrors of history are difficult enough to bear without having to witness and cope with wilful re-enactments of the same taunting and defiling any such attempts to stimulate awareness, resolve and resistance to such forces through art’s most heartfelt efforts.
Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah are in two parts, and demonstrate with disarming directness an extraordinary range of contrasts of mood and feeling, the settings incorporating titles and headings of different verses of the texts, the latter using the Hebraic names for letters and weaving these names into the otherwise Latin text. So we hear the Hebrew letters “Aleph” and “Beth” in Part One, each given an ornate but emotionally neutral ambience before “easing” or else “plunging” into the actual texts, releasing the listener from the intensities of each verse setting with whole breaths of relative space and re-alignment.
As with the transition from the overall tranquility of the “Aleph” settings to the obvious surge of tone from the tenors at Quomodo sedet sola civitas, these progressions into text can happen seamlessly, or be underlined by pauses, such as that separating the following “Beth” from Plorans ploravit in nocte. Amidst the beauty of the singing I wondered whether phrases such as Omnes amici ejus spreverunt eam (all her friends have dealt treacherously with her), here delivered more in sorrow than in anger, were as forceful as what Tallis might have intended – certainly, the concluding Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum (Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God) expressed here to numbing perfection a quietly beseeching tone!
I was struck all over again by the sheer storytelling capacities of the sounds created by the ensemble when Part II of the Lamentations began – having completed two “chapters” of the text we were about to be regaled with no less than three more, with the beauty of utterance putting a listener like myself in mind of a further “unlocking” of a precious casket of treasures. After the splendid “Ghimel” opening, there seemed more insistence and urgency in the interlocking parts, the sopranos arching their phrases heavenwards with plenty of expressive purpose (and especially in the final nec invenit requiem.) The brief “Daleth” introduction to the central verses brings the ear-catching variant of fewer voices for the opening Omnes persecutores emus which builds into an impressive ensemble; and in the following “Omnes porta eius destructae” follows an even more dire scenario with repetitions of the words oppressa amaritudine (bitter anguish) at the end.
The exquisitely architectural “Heth” preluded the grimmest of the prophet’s foretellings, the tenors forthright with the opening Facti sunt hostes ejus in capite (Her foes have become her masters) and the other voices following suit, obsessively so with the words multitudinem iniquitatum ejus (the multitude of her transgressions). And how affecting did the voices make, firstly, the phrase Parvuli ejus ducti sunt (The children were led away), and then the final, quietly and almost desperately penitential murmurings of the same “Jerusalem” entreaty which had concluded Part I, and here returning with deeper finality.
A smaller ensemble tackled William Byrd’s Plorans plorabit, (incidentally, extending the phenomenon of political subversion in music) with its sombre message to the King of the time (James 1) that the “crown of (your) glory” was under threat! Otherwise its relatively tighter and more integrated sound-picture was to make all the more stimulating and telling a contrast with what followed afterwards. In fact Michael Stewart could scarcely contain his excitement at the prospect of performing this, the concert’s “signature” work – John Sheppard’s antiphon Media Vita in Morte Sumus, regarded as “supreme” in the composer’s output by scholars and performers.
A good deal of discussion has accompanied the work’s more recent history, which Stewart made a passing reference to before leaving it up to us to make our own researches due to the complexities of different editions and attitudes towards the work, though commenting that its impact and magnificence would be self-evident for the listener.
For the work’s certainly become something of an icon in its own singular world of choral music as a result of several factors – its unclear raison d’etre (thought by some to be a memorial for the composer’s first wife), its equally mysterious genesis (no copy exists of the composer’s own score, its survival due to the partbooks used to reconstruct the original in the late 1570s), and its inordinate length in early versions which sought to perform all the polyphonic repeats, a practice which certain newer editions have sought to modify, not by shedding any actual music but limiting the number of repeats of material in performance, as well as changing the order of some of the sections – the place of the canticle, the Nunc Dimittis, for example. Applying such an approach to extremes would halve the time some earlier performances might have taken, though Stewart had suggested to us in his pre-concert talk that the Consort’s approach would not be of such a radical order.
At a tempo which readily suggested the celestial movement of unearthly bodies orbiting some distant star, this music’s performance, with its breathtakingly stratospheric soprano line, transported our sensibilities to realms of awareness and imagination far removed from our accustomed realms of being, contemplating an eternal vision which inspires as much fear as longing – Media vita in morte sumus – (In the midst of life we be in death) and contemplating our helplessness at such a prospect at Amarae morti ne tradas nos (- the bitter pains of eternal death) – how readily, to my ears, amid the melismatic Sancte Deus and Sancte fortis, did the soprano lines evoke a distant echo of the yet-to-be-composed Miserere of Grigorio Allegri!
Into this void came the plainchant, given the theatrical treatment of alternating one voice, one section of the voices for the first part of the chant, and then including in the response at the Gloria Patri, the whole choir – if a “time stood still” moment was what was required, then the timing, tonings and placement of the voices was well-nigh perfect in its effect. The resuming of the antiphon maintained the darkness and solemnity of the Nunc Dimittis throughout the following Ne projicias nos (Do not cast us away), during which the radiance of the sopranos was absent with telling sombre effect, and having all the more radiance and candlepower on their return with a repetition of the Sancte Deus/Sancte fortis sequences.
Again the sopranos withdrew at Noli claudere aures tuas (Do not close your ears), with the earthier tones of the lower voices stressing the penitential tones of the suppliants – the more celestial tones take up the text Sancte et misericordis Salvator (O holy and most merciful Saviour) – but even more enchanting was the beautiful, Qui cognoscis occulta corda (You who know the secrets of the heart) begun by those wonderful stratospheric voices which had given the work so much of its essential character – and together with the altos were what my ears seemed to tell me were the men joining in towards the piece’s end. By this time my sensibilities were drunk with the beauties and intensities of what I’d heard and my notes had begun to resembled mere scribblings of transported emotion, well-nigh indecipherable, as all transported emotion should be! Thankfully, wherever I’d been taken by this piece I did manage to reconstitute my senses sufficiently to get home, since which time it’s all been playing in my head demanding a semblance of order and continuity which has taken time to fall into a kind of coherence! Apart from the supercharged transcendentalism of the ending, I can vouch for my presence of mind during some of it. and thus hope enough of my reminiscing of the journey makes sense!