The Sixteen: Choral Pilgrimage review – Byrd celebration hits the heights

William Byrd has been core to the Sixteen’s repertoire since the group’s inception and, in this year, the 400th anniversary of his death, he is the natural focus of their annual Choral Pilgrimage. Byrd’s genius is perennial, but the particular interest in the programme that conductor Harry Christophers has so meticulously put together is the interlinking of works by Dutch and Flemish composers who specifically influenced Byrd, as well as two new pieces commissioned from Dobrinka Tabakova in memorial tribute.

Byrd’s Arise Lord Into Thy Rest and Turn Our Captivity O Lord appeared in his last publication, the 1611 volume, Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets, translations of Latin texts by the Catholic Richard Verstegan and smuggled into England by him. It was these that Tabakova set, creating companion pieces to those of Byrd, with the old preceding the new in each instance. Taking Byrd’s motif of a rising fifth in Arise Lord, but eschewing his polyphonic treatment, Tabakova embroidered her chords with a high melismatic, almost improvisatory, soprano solo line, beautifully sung by Julie Cooper. In Turn Our Captivity O Lord, Byrd – never predictable – brought a spring and change of pace into the music for the words “with jollity”; tellingly, in Tabakova’s setting – its often eastern-sounding ornamentation in the unison soprano line heard over more static but sometimes pungent harmonies – she opted to treat this as “with joy”, infusing the music’s earlier keening nature with a warm radiance.

Standing just forward of Hereford Cathedral’s corona, the Sixteen’s always immaculate delivery seemed to take on a gilded quality here, bringing a glow to the less familiar works by Philip van Wilder, Philippe de Monte and Jacobus Clemens non Papa.

Byrd lived in fear of persecution for his refusal to conform to the requirements of the reformed church while yet continuing to write for illicit services: being favoured by Elizabeth I, who once intervened to prevent his prosecution, miraculously allowed him to survive. A Watchful Gaze, the Choral Pilgrimage’s title, alludes both to the need of recusant Catholics, like him, to be vigilant and also to their prayers to invoke God’s watchfulness. A final resonance came in Byrd’s Vigilate, setting words from St Mark, almost madrigalian in its descriptiveness and, in the slower, slumbering pulse of “dormientes”, a warning against the possibilities of dawn raids. In its stern ending “omnibus dico”, “I say to all”, was a distinctly contemporary frisson.

• At Llandaff Cathedral on 20 April, Truro Cathedral on 21 April, then Derby and Peterborough Cathedrals on 12 and 13 May. Then touring until 26 October