Tag: Christopher Tye

Songs For Troubled Times – Music From Reformation England, Cinquecento, Wigmore Hall, 7 November 2022

We do like a bit of Renaissance music at the Wig. This lunchtime concert seemed just the ticket when we booked it months ago and still seemed like a coveted ticket come the day.

We had heard of Cinquecento but not seen them before, although it seems they have been around for some time.

Below is a mini taster of them singing some other stuff…

…while our concert focussed on English Reformation period composers: John Sheppard, Thomas Tallis, Christopher Tye & William Byrd.

If you have found this Ogblog piece within 30 days of the concert, you can still hear the BBC Radio 3 broadcast of it through this link to BBC Sounds.

The Wigmore Hall streamed this concert. The stream can be found through this link if you would like to see it – I’m not sure if you need to register or not to see/hear it this way.

We thought it was an excellent concert. This size of ensemble and style of music works perfectly, to our ears, in The Wigmore Hall. The Tallis in particular was a memorably wonderful sound.

Christopher Tye and Claude Le Jeune: 16th-century musical radicals, Wigmore Hall, 22 October 2017

I got several e-mails from the Wig slightly changing this concert; at one point swapping an artiste, at another tweaking the programme. At no point undermining my purpose, which was to hear viol music by two Renaissance composers whose viol music I had never heard before.

Here is the Wigmore Hall page on the gig we finally saw.

We really enjoyed our evening.

It was more or less exactly a year ago that we saw and heard Phantasm do a wonderful job of Orlando Gibbons – click here.

In truth, I think Gibbons is the better gig – or at least more to our taste.

The Tye is rather relentlessly somber. But he must  have been a spunky chap. Word on the street is that Queen Elizabeth did not like his playing and sent a verger to tell Tye that he was playing out of tune. Tye sent back the message that it was her ears that were out of tune. I’ll remember that riposte for my baroq-ulele playing and singing.

Still, we preferred the Le Jeune, who was new to both of us as a composer and far more upbeat.

Janie was a little disappointed that the lute was such a bit part for these pieces. We had recently seen Paul O’Dette’s superb solo concert – click here – but of course when the lute was part of an ensemble it tended to have a continuo role in those days.

We always get a warm feeling with Phantasm. Laurence Dreyfus comes across so nicely and explains things without the slightest note of condescension.

Yes we enjoyed very much indeed. If you have never seen Phantasm live, seek them out. If you live in a remote place, I would recommend the Gibbons as a place to start listening,ahead of Tye or Le Jeune,  but for sure do listen to some…

…and if it is the Tye you fancy, you can click the image below and Amazon it:

Out of the Deep, The Cardinall’s Musick, Wigmore Hall, 18 July 2017

The Boy (Morales) From Seville

Janie and I really like this sort of 16th century music and here was a rare chance to listen to Cristóbal de Morales’s requiem, along with a swathe of English stuff from a similar period.

Morales was from Seville although his sound is heavily influenced by his years in Rome too.

Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall’s information on the gig.

Jolly it wasn’t, but then what do you expect when you choose to hear requiem masses, Jeremiah’s lamentations and that sort of thing?

But very beautiful it was.

I especially enjoyed the Morales, which was the main reason I booked the concert. We hear quite a lot of the 16th century English stuff, whereas the Morales felt like a rare treat.

This type of music (mostly 10 voices in five parts) works so well in the Wigmore Hall and The Cardinall’s Musick are really superb at delivering this stuff. Andrew Carwood always explains the context in detail, but not painful detail.

The audience lapped it all up and managed to coax the team back onto the pitch for an encore – I think it was the first two verses from Tallis’s Psalm 1 setting.

It was a Tuesday evening and Janie had early patients etc. the next day, so we didn’t dine together – I think Janie got home just before the heavens opened. Good job I was in the flat when the rains came – it was torrential and I had left windows open. There’d have been Jeremiah-style lamentations from me if my computer and/or baroq-ulele had got wet.

Stile Antico, Wigmore Hall, In Pace: Music For Compline, 27 November 2015

What a wonderful way to end the working week; a concert of beautiful early music.  We’ve seen Stile Antico before at the Wigmore Hall; they are a truly inspirational vocal ensemble.

We ran into Eric Rhode and his wife, Maria at this concert, as often we do.  He is no doubt at the Wigmore Hall even as I write, as I know there is early music on there right now, a couple of weeks’ after the Stile Antico event.

You can read all about Stile Antico and the superb programme of early music, if you choose to click here and browse the prgramme.

Revisiting this article in May 2020 during Covid-19 lockdown, I am glad to see that, in 2015, Stile Antico showed off their skills by singing Renaissance pieces that were designed for 12 voices. Lockdown has strangely enabled the group to multiply virtually, producing the following delicious 40 part performance of Tallis’s Spem In Alium:

But in truth, the concert we heard that might would have looked and sounded more like the following recording from 2013 of William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus at The Wig itself:

They’re good, I’m telling you, they’re good.