Part of this year’s commemoration of the 400th anniversary of William Byrd’s death, the final concert of the Spitalfields festival also formed a meditation on the nature and necessity of art at times of religious persecution. Byrd’s Masses for Three, Four and Five Voices, the works of a Catholic recusant, composed for secret liturgical use in private houses during the Reformation, were performed by the Odyssean Ensemble under Colm Carey, and interwoven with readings by Emma Fielding of contemporary poetry by Afghan women, some in exile, some still living under the Taliban, all of them unnamed. The concert took place, meanwhile, at the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London, and the venue’s history as the resting place of both Catholic and Protestant victims of political expediency and religious intolerance (Thomas More, Catherine Howard, Anne Boleyn, Jane Grey) inevitably coloured the sombre, reflective atmosphere.
Words and music to some extent expressed contrarieties here. The poetry captured the stultifying monotony of oppression (“How are we able to breathe and keep going, going, going on?”), demanded we weaponise language (“Load poems like guns!”) and bristled with a defiant refusal to allow individual voices to be silenced (“Wail and sing I will,” one angry refrain runs). Byrd’s music, in contrast, seemed to turn away from temporal concerns to gaze fixedly into eternity, though in the context, we were also very much aware of how each mass is essentially a prayer for peace in dark times.
It would perhaps have been better, however, to confine the poetry to before and between the masses rather than breaking into each one at the close of its credo, which on occasion hampered the musical flow. But Fielding spoke with a restrained, yet fierce intensity throughout, and the singing, with one voice to a part, was consistently sublime in its purity of line and clarity of counterpoint. The character of each work was beautifully defined, too, from the austere beauty of the complex Mass for Three Voices to the greater grandeur of its counterpart for five singers, and the emotional depth of the Mass for Four Voices, where Byrd’s closing prayer for peace is most heartfelt and moving.
