REVIEW -- GUNPOWDER, TREASON and PLOT!
GUY FAWKES and WILLIAM BYRD

Performed by THE LANCASTER SINGERS
directed by DENIS MCCALDIN
with IAN PATTISON (organ) and PETER SAMPSON (narrator)

Lancaster Priory Church, Lancaster
Saturday 18 March 2006

"Gunpowder, Treason & Plot! is the title of this appreciation, in words and music, of the life and times of the great Elizabethan composer, William Byrd. Speaking from the pulpit of Lancaster Priory, Byrd... tells the story of Guy Fawkes and the political intrigues of the early 1600s -- when Protestant England was threatened by Catholic terrorists. Byrd's great Mass for Four Voices forms the backbone of the music, which is interspersed with madrigals and organ music of the time."

So says the comprehensive programme to this event, and that is just what we got last Saturday night. The Lancaster Singers, under Denis McCaldin's clear and sensitive guidance, sang secular and sacred music, in Latin and in English, by William Byrd (1543 -- 1623) and his contemporaries.

Ian Pattison played a fine, period-sounding chamber organ and also delivered some stylish, idiomatic and clear performances of the keyboard music by Byrd, his mentor Thomas Tallis (1505 -- 1585) and Orlando Gibbons (1583 -- 1625).

The diction and clarity of the 40-strong choir was good, with some intelligent phrasing and dynamics. There was real drama during some of the Mass sections, though a little more passion and abandon would have ensured a raunchier performance of John Farmer's quite unrespectable Fair Phyllis I saw sitting all alone of 1599. “Up and down he wandered”, indeed …

But that is a minor criticism. The whole event was a dramatic and musical feast, and delivered several timely reminders. First, the narrative clearly and sometimes painfully described the troubled times for Catholics (and at the other end of the religious spectrum, for Puritans too, be it noted -- and don't even mention the outlawed Jews in Jacobean England).

There were vivid cameos showing the mortal fear and dread Christians of all persuasions lived under in the violent generations from the Reformation to the 'Glorious' [sic] Revolution of one and a half centuries later. And beyond ... even into our present time, because in our age of fundamentalist and religo-political terrorism, the menace and conflict are still very much a reality.

Second, it struck me hard that only a few yards from The Priory is the Castle, where 'heretics' and 'traitors' had been incarcerated and condemned in those dank dungeons before their gruesome deaths on the other side of town during the hundred years and more between c1550 and 1650. I was sickeningly reminded of Guantànamo Bay and Belmarsh Prison. Why do we never learn?

Last, though, this Catholic musician and writer was nonetheless momentarily transported back to any one of the many Lancashire recusant households where the Sacraments were clandestinely but nonetheless devotedly celebrated - with Byrd's or similar ethereal, mystically beautiful devotional music.

Amid our sad distracted times, this excellent, reflective and though-provoking evening was a veritable musical, dramatic and, for me at any rate, a spiritual oasis of blessed joy and comfort.

Copyright © 21 March 2006 Michael Nunn