Composer: William Byrd
Performer: The Marian Consort
Conductor: Rory McCleery
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Delphian
Release: 2020
Size: 573 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. Cantiones sacrae II (Excerpts) – No. 13, Miserere mei Deus
02. Gaudeamus omnes
Mass for four voices
03. I. Kyrie
04. II. Gloria
05. Timete Dominum
06. Mass for four voices – III. Credo
07. Ave Maria
08. Laetentur coeli
09. Mass for four voices – IV. Sanctus – Benedictus
10. Justorum animae
11. Mass for four voices – V. Agnus Dei
12. Deo gratias
13. Beati mundo corde
14. Cantiones sacrae II (Excerpts) – No. 16, Infelix ego
In the turbulent religious climate of Elizabethan England William Byrd wrote — and, more audaciously, published — a huge amount of music for the Catholic rite, for services which he and his fellow Catholics had to celebrate clandestinely, in the private houses and chapels of sympathetic noblemen.
The cloistered intimacy of those occasions is reenacted in The Marian Consort’s performances here, and their programme also explores the more coded ways in which Byrd was able to express his faith and his commitment to the recusant cause: settings of texts which had become associated with Jesuit martyrs, or biblical pleas for divine intervention which took on new, heightened meaning in these times of persecution.
Most moving of all is the motet Infelix ego, with Byrd weaving in homages to a still-intact tradition of Continental composers stretching back a century and a half as the text arcs from dejection and misery to repentance and finally hope, made manifest in music of transformative power.