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Track(s) taken from SIGCD295

Tristitia et anxietas

composer
5vv; Cantiones sacrae 1589
author of text
adapted from Lamentations 5: 17

Gallicantus, Gabriel Crouch (conductor)
Recording details: January 2011
St Michael's Church, Summertown, Oxford, United Kingdom
Produced by Adrian Peacock & Nigel Short
Engineered by Andrew Mellor & Dave Rowell
Release date: June 2012
Total duration: 9 minutes 17 seconds
 

Other recordings available for download

The Gesualdo Six, Owain Park (director)
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips (conductor)
Tonus Peregrinus
Contrapunctus, Owen Rees (conductor)

Reviews

'Gallicantus explores Byrd's fascinating 'personal musical exchange' with Philippe de Monte in The Word Unspoken. Six Byrd motets sit alongside five by the Italian who, like Richafort, deserves to step out from under the shadow cast by giant contemporaries.The singing is beyond exemplary: deeply felt, tenderly phrased, perfectly balanced, with the most profound understanding, seemingly bred in the bone' (Choir & Organ)

'As a specialist early-music consort, Gallicantus are perfectly placed here to compare the works of William Byrd and Philippe de Monte—the one a Catholic recusant fortunate in the favour of Elizabeth I for his simpler Protestant pieces, the other a Flemish sympathiser and correspondent. Gallicantus render exquisitely the ornate verses of Byrd's Cantiones Sacrae, their interwoven timbres cascading in noble equilibrium; but the most direct comparison is between de Monte's 'Superflumina Babylonis' and Byrd's 'Quomodo cantabimus', both derived from Psalm 136, which subsequently gave the world Boney M's deathless 'Rivers of Babylon'. In this case at least, music is the winner, whichever one prefers' (The Independent)

'Culminating in beautiful performances of Byrd and Monte's famous collaboration (one might almost say commiseration) Super flumina Babylonis/Quomodo cantabimus, this album brings together some of Byrd's most agonized musical utterances with some surprisingly melancholy works by Monte' (Early Music Review)» More
In Tristitia et anxietas we see Byrd’s powers as a musical orator at their most potent and compelling. The emotive power is intensified by the expansiveness of the canvas on which each element of the text is depicted, such as the doleful and mesmerically repetitive intoning of the opening word ‘tristitia’, the steadily mounting anguish of the successive statements of ‘in dolore’, the urgently paced cries of ‘consolare’, and the concluding pleas of ‘miserere mei’.

from notes by Owen Rees © 2020

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GIMDN902DeletedThis album is not available for download
Byrd: Playing Elizabeth's Tune
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Byrd: Playing Elizabeth's Tune
GIMSA592DeletedThis album is not available for download
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