Stile Antico

In a Strange Land

Harmonia Mundi

ALTHOUGH it is surely unintended, it is not hard not to invest the latest album from vocal ensemble Stile Antico with parallels to the vexed times in which we now live. In fact it is a very careful consideration of the work of composers of the earlier Elizabethan age who found themselves in internal exile, or sought work in the Low Countries or Scandinavia because of their Catholicism.

None of this is news, even in its historical minutiae.

Willam Byrd, we know, remained at court despite his faith, as favourite of the Queen, while John Dowland was more a chap with an eye on the prize than anyone’s victim.

Both have a pair of compositions among the beautifully-recorded unaccompanied works here, under the artistic direction of Oxford early music scholar Jeremy Summerly. So does Peter Philips, from his Cantiones sacrae of 1612, who was a genuine refugee and worked in Antwerp and Brussels. Works by Richard Dering, Philippe de Monte and Robert White, whose 20-minute setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah closes the set, are less familiar, and the album also includes a new composition, setting Sharespeare’s poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, written for the group by Huw Watkins.

The verse is one of the great enigmas in the Shakespeare canon, and only one interpretation of it (that it identifies the Bard as a Catholic sympathiser and memorialises a martyr couple) makes it a fitting inclusion for the theme of the disc. More to the point, however, it is a beautiful piece that sits very well alongside work from four centuries before.

Keith Bruce