Review: The Sixteen, St Chad's Church, Shrewsbury
For the second successive year Shropshire Music Trust have presented a concert by the highly acclaimed The Sixteen, a choral group specialising in Renaissance music but by no means limited to that idiom.
St Chad's Church, Shrewsbury, played host to the choir under their founder and conductor Harry Christophers with a very full and appreciative audience.
The programme was carefully chosen to portray works by Allegri and Palestrina (from two generations earlier) and also to contrast these with works by contemporary James Macmillan. Allegri's Miserere is well known to radio listeners and is deservedly well loved with its noble sonority for the double choir and soaring heights for the soprano soloist.
Christophers has re-edited the work from several sources and the resulting purified version has several interesting moments reminiscent of the composer Gesualdo 50 years earlier at his most outrageous in harmonic invention.
James Macmillan's Miserere was inevitably a contrast, with 350 years between the works, but the spirit of the Renaissance style shone through with brilliant clarity.
Both in this and his earlier O Radiant Dawn, the use of very close dissonances produced stony, flint-like chilly backdrop to beautiful melodic lines expressing the penitence of the sinner.
The Sixteen are able to produce this very sombre effect as readily as the warmth and richness needed for Palestrina's Stabat Mater and the result was a concert with an evident unifying theme performed with flawless musicianship.
From The Sixteen we now expect nothing less! The next Trust concert is on May 12 with The Innovation Ensemble at Concord College Theatre.
By Richard Duncan
