Circumdederunt me shows Byrd in a more mournful light but also in a more contemporary one. He employs a number of telling harmonic shifts which he must have learned from his Continental colleagues and developed in his younger years. The piece moves upwards in tessitura and intensity at the repeated words ‘O Domine, libera animam meam’ (‘O Lord, free my soul’) before subsiding as if exhausted.
from notes by Andrew Carwood © 2009
