Byrd Ensemble: Penitence & Lamentation
Scribe Records

An immense amount of time and distance separates English Renaissance composer William Byrd (1543-1623) and the Seattle-based Byrd Ensemble, a professional vocal ensemble led by choral director Markdavin Obenza. All such separation falls away the moment the group gives voice to works by their namesake and his contemporaries. Its latest album, Penitence & Lamentation, arrives four centuries after Byrd's death and naturally includes a number of pieces by him; yet while the group specializes in chamber vocal music, particularly Renaissance polyphony, the album casts a wider net in including the world premiere recording of Nico Muhly's Fallings (2023). Another detail invites clarification too: in being thematically oriented around guilt, grief, loss, and regret, Penitence & Lamentation might suggest a dour and dispiriting listen. In fact, the seventy-three-minute recording is anything but thanks to the vocal splendour of the ensemble and music that's often uplifting.

Together for twenty years, the group has achieved a lustrous vocal blend of great purity, power, and refinement. Its sound has been documented on six Scribe Records, including Our Lady: Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks (2011), In the Company of William Byrd (2012), Music for the Tudors (2015), and Music of the Renaissance: Italy, England & France (2016). While the booklet accompanying Penitence & Lamentation lists a varied group of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses, most of the photos show ten singers plus Obenza, a number that allows for a glorious sound without losing the intimacy of a smaller vocal unit.

Though the texts the composers set are religious, the works' universal themes resonate regardless of one's beliefs. Opening the album is Lugebat David Absalon by Nicolas Gombert (1495-1560), which moves through multiple stages of grief as it expresses David's lament for his son. The sadness permeating the opening section is movingly conveyed by the singers' graceful vocal polyphony; grief grows in intensity as the piece enters its anguished second half until it culminates in a resonant wail. Indicative of Gombert's artistry is how effectively he matches the musical character to each line of the text.

Thomas Tallis (1505-85) is represented by two works, Absterge Domine reverent, penitential, and supplicating in both musical tone and text content and In jejunio et fletu memorable for its emphasis on extremely low ranges and phrases that have the singers intoning at the bottom of their range (that the text describes the praying of priests might have factored into Tallis's decision to accentuate deep voices). That Pater Peccavi, on the other hand, emphasizes upper voices seems a fitting choice for a Thomas Crecquillon (1505-57) setting that presents the penitent words of the son without the father's replies. The eight-voice arrangement produces a harmonious sound of luscious beauty.

Robert Ramsey (1590s–1644) is accounted for by How are the Mighty Fallen, another lament by David (this one on the death of his best friend Jonathan) that the composer is believed to have written in response to the 1612 death by typhoid fever of Prince Henry. A noticeable shift in tone emerges in the contrast between an opening and closing that mourn the death and a middle part that celebrates the relationship between the two men.

Four Byrd settings appear, from the haunting tapestries Domine secumdum actum meum and Emendemus in melius to Ye sacred muses, whose closing words “Tallis is dead, and Music dies” reveals that the heartfelt elegy was written in memory of Byrd's friend and collaborator. The fourth, Ne irascaris Domine, moves from a prayerful opening that pleas for God's mercy to a second part that laments the desolation of Jerusalem. Fallings by Muhly (b. 1981) is smartly sequenced to follow Ne irascaris Domine when the new work borrows tiny melodic fragments and harmonic building-blocks from Byrd's creation. Muhly's piece complements the others in its use of vocal counterpoint and hymnal character, but it also individuates itself in featuring daring harmonic gestures, with the “burning of fire” passage particularly arresting.

January 2024