26 LF: English Glories of the 16th Century
St Baldred’s Church, North Berwick, 14/9/2026
Tenebrae, Nigel Short (Director)
It didn’t come as a huge surprise to me when it was announced that this concert had sold like an Oasis gig, selling out almost as soon as booking opened. The combination of a fabulous programme of 16th century English polyphony and the presence of one of the best vocal ensembles around, Tenebrae, was a heady combination, and it must be said that it was an absolutely fabulous concert. Before I embarked on an operatic career, Renaissance choral music had been a great passion of mine, learning much of the repertoire at St Andrews University in the renowned Renaissance Group, which recently celebrated its 70th anniversary.
Nigel Short, and his core ensemble of 11 singers, presented a heady mix of music by the two titans of 16th century English polyphony, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, as well as lesser known motets by Robert White and William Mundy. They started off in the lovely apse of the beautiful Victorian Church of St Baldred in North Berwick, a new venue to me and an excellent one, with White’s third version of the Compline hymn, ‘Christe qui Lux est’ (O Christ, you who are the light and day). This five part setting, alternating between plainsong sections and harmonised verses, unusually places the cantus firmus (the theme tune, as it were) in the soprano part, thus allowing the listener to feel smug in the knowledge that the tune is clear throughout. This piece immediately revealed the utterly homogenous sound of the ensemble, all parts blending perfectly to create an ideal balance between voices, and the crisp conducting of Nigel Short established a control which never wavered throughout the concert.
The group then moved forward to a specially constructed platform where the apse meets the nave, raising the performers up so they could be seen by everyone. This was a major breakthrough for the Festival, as the perennial problem with choirs in churches is that they have to perform on the same level as the audience, destroying sight lines, a major problem this year at the Edinburgh Festival, when the Gesualdo Six played out their excellent ‘Death of Gesualdo’ in the Queen’s Hall, largely unseen by the audience sitting in the stalls.
Tenebrae, standing in a loose semi-circle with two sopranos on either end, with tenors, basses and altos in between, next sang William Byrd’s sublime Mass for 4 voices, a performance as near perfect as one might hope to hear. I have known this extraordinary piece for over 50 years, written for liturgical use by clandestine groups of Catholics in Reformation England in the 16th century, and I can truly say I have not heard it sung better. The deeply moving Agnus Dei moved me to tears, and I am not embarrassed to admit it. Although not a believer myself, it conveys a spiritual message which touches the heart, and the succession of overlapping harmonic suspensions take the listener to a place of peace and calm, rarely found these days. I must commend, in particular, the two tenors, Jeremy Budd and Joseph Wicks (also a stalwart of the Gesualdo Six), who sang the high-lying part exquisitely and with a rapt beauty of tone. All the voices were superb, and talking to Nigel later, it didn’t surprise me to hear that their auditions for the ensemble ran to the hundreds of candidates, meaning that only the best voices sing in the group, the crème de la crème as it were.
Nigel Short and I go back over 30 years, when we both sang in tours and recordings with the English Concert. He was a counter-tenor in those days, joining, for a few years, the prestigious King’s Singers, but in 2001, he founded Tenebrae, which has gone on to perform, record and win prizes consistently ever since.
The first half ended with a work I didn’t know, ‘Exaudiat in Dominus’, by Robert White, whose career coincided with the middle years of the great Tallis/Byrd era, and this extended motet certainly showed off the full range of White’s genius – passages of lightly scored harmonies contrasted with glorious seven part polyphony, which threatened to take the roof off St Baldred’s, and the breathy WOW! which greeted the end of the piece from quite a proper lady behind me was an apposite reaction.
After the interval, during which many of us tumbled out into the balmy North Berwick afternoon, the second half was devoted almost exclusively to the genius of Thomas Tallis, a heady combination of Loquebantur Variis Linguis, the low-pitched O Sacrum Convivium, Sancte Deus and the clever double canon of Miserere Nostri.
The ensemble returned to the apse for the exquisite ‘If ye Love me’, and the whole concert came to an extraordinary climax with William Mundy’s extended motet, Vox Patris Celestis (The Voice of the Heavenly Father). This was another piece unknown to me, and its heady brilliance, with high soprano lines similar to the earlier masters like Sheppard and our own Scottish master, Robert Carver, left the audience enthralled and demanding more!
We were treated, on the group’s return to the podium stage, with Byrd’s sublime motet, Ave Verun Corpus, delivered from memory by the magnificent Tenebrae, conducted by their tireless director, Nigel Short. A truly great Lammermuir concert!
