Loquebantur, Music from the Baldwin Partbooks, The Marian Consort, Rory McCleery, Rose Consort of Viols (Delphian)I've probably bought fewer records this year than in most recent years so I was due some when this and a new Tallis Scholars disc were released a few weeks ago. But I thought how much of this music I already have and demurred. Then last week Radio 3's The Choir played a piece from this and, for the love of God, it was soon being ordered.
George Baldwin was a lay clerk at Windsor in 1575...and the so-called 'Baldwin Partbooks', held at Christ Church, Oxford, were his creation'.
So this is a similar collection to, but later than, the Eton Choirbook.
The consort of viols punctuate the stellar vocal pieces with more terrestrial interludes but the highlights are in the singing, the sopranos Emma Walshe and Gwendolen Martin and countertenors Daniel Collins and Rory McCleary stretching effortlessly, or easily enough, into the acoustic of Merton College Chapel. After the Tallis Loquebantur variis linguis has uwrapped and explained itself in gathering celebration, its parts prefiguring the style of trad jazz by 400 years as each leads off from another, we can soon see how William Byrd learnt from the master in O salutaris hostia, with words by Thomas Aquinas that don't convince the C21st atheist of their copper-bottomed wisdom,
O sacrifice that brings salvation,
That opens the gate of heaven.
More earthbound in sentiment but persuasive in its soprano top line is Dum transisset Sabbatum by Christian Hollander (1510-1568/9) in which Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jmes and Salome bring spices to anoint Jesus.
I dare say the instrumental pieces are put in to break up the succession of pure vocal elaborations. I'd generally prefer a disc of voices and another disc of viol music but in this case, it is about a selection from the book and so here is John Taverner diverting into chamber music with Quaemadmodum, not the Taverner we get from the Tallis Scholars but thought to have been originally a setting of Psalm 42.
I suspect the William Mundy Adhaesit pavimento and John Sheppard Ave Maris Stella with which the Marian Consort finish are the most ambitious, grandest compositions saved for the end, the finale surely the outstandingly stately and monastic item on the programme. In between these comes Baldwin's own off-beat appearance in Coockow as I me walked that Steeleye Span might like to discover one day. But we are left at our profoundest with Sheppard returning us strictly to a Vespers hymn and an appropriately devotional place to end.
As an habitual purchaser of records like this, I can't say that anything on it has recommended itself as a candidate for the ultimate shortlist of greatest things of the age and maybe the Eton Choirbook is ahead of Baldwin, which is not to say it's anything less than a fine disc but if you live in paradise then routine gloriousness happens all the time and one can begin to take it for granted.