This year, the Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage, the tour that Harry Christophers and his choir make each year around the cathedrals and major churches of the British Isles, is devoted to two composers of the Spanish Golden Age. Francisco Guerrero (1528-1599), and Alonso Lobo (1555-1617) – who was first a choirboy and then Guerrero’s assistant at Seville Cathedral, before becoming maestro in Toledo – may be less well known now than their great contemporary Tomás Luis de Victoria, but Christophers has devised a sequence that weaves together strikingly beautiful liturgical settings by both composers. Movements from masses provide the spine; the Kyrie is taken from Lobo’s Missa Maria Magdalene, the Gloria from Guerrero’s Missa Surge Propera, and so on. But it’s the motets around them that are most striking: Guerrero’s Maria Magdalene and 12-part Duo Seraphim; Lobo’s Ave Maria and his most famous work, Versa Est in Luctum, drooping with dissonances and composed as an elegy for Philip II in 1598. The Sixteen performances may be a little detached and disembodied at times, but the poised beauty of their singing never fails.
