Weelkes - Gentleman Extraordinary: Anthems, Services, and Instrumental Music
£13.25
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Label: Resonus Classics
Cat No: RES10325
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Release Date: 10th November 2023
Contents
Artists
ResurgamThe English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble
Conductor
Mark DuleyArtists
ResurgamThe English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble
Conductor
Mark DuleyAbout
Celebrated as one of the finest Tudor composers, Thomas Weelkes served as organist and choirmaster at Winchester College and Chichester Cathedral and although famed for his madrigals, wrote more Anglican services than any other major composer of the time. Performed by the professional Irish vocal ensemble Resurgam with The English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble, this album celebrates the sacred music from this prolific composer in Weelkes’s 400th anniversary year.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Alleluia, I heard a voice
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2Pavan No. 1 (Mr Weelkes his Lachrymae)
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3Evening Service for Trebles I. Magnificat
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4Evening Service for Trebles II. Nunc dimittis
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5Pavan No. 5 a5
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6Give the king thy judgements, O God
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7Most mighty and all-knowing Lord
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8O Lord, arise
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9Fantasia of Six Parts
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10Voluntary [I]
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11Ninth Evening Service I. Magnificat
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12Ninth Evening Service II. Nunc dimittis
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13Voluntary [II]
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14O Lord, grant the king a long life
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15Give ear, O Lord
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16Pavan No. 6 a5
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17Evening Service in medio chori I. Magnificat
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18Evening Service in medio chori II. Nunc dimittis
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19Hosanna to the Son of David
Europadisc Review
Prominent among this year’s musical anniversaries has been the quatercentenary of the death of William Byrd, the great Elizabethan composer and one of the greatest creative minds in all English music. But just a few months after Byrd’s death in July 1623, one of his younger contemporaries also passed away: Thomas Weelkes, a composer of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period chiefly remembered now for his madrigals, and also for his notoriously intemperate lifestyle. In January this year we reviewed a disc from The King’s Singers and Fretwork on which the music of ‘Tom + Will’ was paired together. Now, as the date of Weelkes’s demise is upon us (30 November), comes a new release from the Irish vocal ensemble Resurgam, in partnership with The English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble, devoted to his instrumental and sacred vocal music.
The unusually thoughtful liner notes to ‘Gentleman Extraordinary’ – by Andrew Johnstone – re-examine many of the supposed facts around Weelkes’s life and reputation. Crucially, they stress that while he may have lacked favour at court (where he was a supernumerary singer rather than a regular member of the Chapel Royal), the authorities at Chichester where he spent the majority of his professional career as lay clerk, organist and choirmaster seem to have gone to special efforts to retain his services, even when a pair of complaints – from a fellow lay clerk named William Lawes (not the great composer of the same name!) – ensured that he was suspended from duties for drinking and blasphemy.
The damage to Weelkes’s reputation as a result of this apparently personal vendetta was long and deep, and may have contributed to his relatively early death. Yet his musical output, as evidenced by these superb performances under the direction of Mark Duley, is among the most distinctive of the period, thanks in part to Weelkes’s habit of reusing certain phrases and motifs, often across pairs of anthems and service music (evening canticles), in much the same way as composers of the European Renaissance paired motets and masses. To our modern ears, this creates an unmistakably personal style, where Weelkes’s contemporaries may instead have simply detected a lack of inventiveness (inventio).
In Weelkes’s day the Chichester Cathedral Choir was not a large one, so that large-scale works divided antiphonally between decani and cantoris were relatively rare. Instead, both the Evening Service for Trebles and the Evening Service in medio chori feature the upper voices prominently, sung here with crystalline purity by the young female voices of Resurgam. The ‘Trebles’ Service contains something of the most attractive music in all of Weelkes’s nine surviving evening services, with many solo passages, while ‘in medio chori’ makes a special feature of the three upper voices, perhaps designed to be sung in the middle of the choir stalls, between the ‘dec’ and ‘can’ stalls.
The other service here is the Ninth Evening Service (the numbering is modern), a far more opulent affair for 10-part choir, apparently modelled on Byrd’s Great Service, whose Nunc dimittis it even exceeds in scale, creating what Andrew Johnstone describes as ‘by some distance the most imposing setting of that canticle from the period’. With its majestic unfolding and bold dissonances created by clashing major/minor chords, it is hard to disagree with such a statement.
If the evening services form the backbone of the present release, the anthems – many of them evidently composed with a view to royal patronage – are no less fascinating or absorbing. They include the splendid O Lord, grant the king a long life, performed earlier this year at King Charles III’s coronation, while the disc opens with Alleluia, I heard a voice (which shares a sizeable chunk of music with the Nunc dimittis from the Trebles Service) and closes with the glorious Hosanna to the Son of David (its text adapted by Weelkes, possibly to serve as an accession anthem for James I). Whether accompanied by organ or the pungent brass of the cornets and sackbuts, the voices of Resurgam under Duley’s unerringly paced direction make an imposing yet wonderfully sensitive sound, the long lines exquisitely shaped, bringing out all the beauty of Weelkes’s rough-hewn invention.
Organist Silas Wollston, playing an instrument based on 16th-century models with hand-operated bellows, features as soloist in two engaging voluntaries, while the brass come into their own in three Pavans and a ‘Fantasia of Six Parts’. Recorded earlier this year in the warmly resonant acoustic of Holy Trinity Church, Minchinhampton, Stroud, this is an album where performances and background research together provide a welcome boost for Weelkes’s reputation. Beautifully presented by the Resonus label, it’s a fitting tribute to an underestimated figure in English music whose skills evidently extended well beyond the confines of the madrigals for which he is best known.
Reviews
A belated marking of the 400th anniversary last year of Thomas Weelkes’s death, this fine disc features some splendid singing and playing, nowhere more so than in the sublime Alleluia, I Heard a Voice and the composer’s Evening Service for Trebles. Strongly recommended.The Sunday Times 14 January 2024
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