Straddling the late Tudor and early Jacobean periods, in many ways Orlando Gibbons provides the compositional link between William Byrd and Henry Purcell. O Lord, in thy wrath rebuke me not shares its opening with the composer’s Fantasia a 6 No 5 for viols, but the magic here is in the shifting textures employed to bring the text to life. Gibbons deliberately reduces the forces to highlight two major points in the text: ‘for I am weak’ is sung only by the upper three voices, and the exclusion of highest voice for ‘My soul is also sore troubled’ then intensifies the following cry of ‘but, Lord, how long wilt thou punish me?’, which itself contains the work’s most surprising, but ultimately most delicious chord.

from notes by Owain Park © 2018