The Sixteen have taken the Virgin Mother and Child as theme for their touring Christmas celebration. Again, Harry Christophers’ gift for creating sequences in which Tudor polyphony and contemporary works complement each other was manifest. Historical differences began to blur and, such was the ethereal effect, time itself seemed to stand still.
Prefaced by the plainchant introit for Christmas Day on which it is based, the Gloria from Thomas Tallis’s mass Puer Natus Est wove an intricate web, Tallis’s seven-part counterpoint offering one of the most ecstatic musical flowerings of the age, elegantly realised by the Sixteen. The contrast with John Tavener’s 1982 setting of William Blake’s The Lamb – used in the soundtrack to Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty – was striking. In James MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn, the music’s growing intensity parallels the Christ-child’s light, while in Gabriel Jackson’s The Christ Child, it was a final high soprano appearing from the texture like a shooting-star that made its aural mark and, in Alec Roth’s Song of the Shepherds, the occasionally acid harmony.
Boris Ord’s Adam Lay Ybounden has long joined the canon of more familiar carols; in Howard Skempton’s setting of the same 15th-century text it was the underlying rocking movement that set the gently poignant tone, but which also permitted the resolution to the major in the final Deo Gracias! to emerge with glowing resonance. Richard Pygott and William Byrd – interleaving motets by Peter Philips – cast their serene spell and the evening’s only intrusive element was an embarrassing contagion of audience coughs in the worst possible place. Tavener’s O, Do Not Move, a tiny icon of the nativity, perfect in its brevity, struggled to be heard. Do go to the Sixteen’s remaining performances, just stifle the coughing.
- At St John the Evangelist, Oxford, 13 December. Box office: 01865 305305. Then at Concert Hall, Reading, 15 December (0118-960 6060) and touring until 20 December.
