Soprano Anna Prohaska’s recital with the viol consort Phantasm formed part of the latter’s Byrd Compared, a Wigmore concert series begun last year to mark the 400th anniversary of William Byrd’s death by juxtaposing his viol music with works by his contemporaries and successors. In this instance, his consort songs – by turns sacred and profane, witty and erotic – were placed alongside music written, or arranged, for comparable forces by Tallis, Gesualdo and Dowland, together with a handful of Byrd’s own instrumental pieces.
Prohaska, a exceptionally versatile artist, is noted for a breadth of repertory that ranges from rare and specialist baroque to contemporary via the 18th and 19th century mainstreams, and is perfectly at ease in composers as far apart stylistically as Kurtág, Eisler, Mozart and Bach. At the Wigmore Hall, her way with music from the English and Italian Renaissance was characterised by impeccable assurance and deep sincerity, her tone a mixture of silk and silver, the words etched with admirable restraint.
Byrd’s Ye Sacred Muses, mourning Tallis’s death in 1585 (and with it, the text suggests, the death of music itself), was done with quiet intensity, while Tallis’s own Why Fum’th in Fight (which gave Vaughan Williams the theme for his famous Fantasia) sounded almost combative in its austere vigour. A group of Dowland’s lute songs – some arranged for viols in the 16th century, others by Phantasm’s director, Laurence Dreyfus – were exquisite in their purity of line and refined melancholy. And Byrd’s ribald In Fields Abroad contrasted nicely both with the deeper sensuality of his La Virginella and the greater heat of Gesualdo’s typically anguished Itene, O Miei Sospiri.
Much of this music is rooted in counterpoint, and so Prohaska and Phantasm inevitably became an ensemble of equals at times. The consort’s playing, immaculate in its balance, was rich in tone and detail, with every line admirably clear, while Byrd’s fantasias and instrumental pieces seem to traverse complex emotions in the briefest of musical spans. An exceptional evening, every single second of it.
• The final part of Phantasm’s Byrd series is at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 25 June.
