The superb early music vocal ensemble, Stile Antico, arrive in London to perform A Renaissance Christmas fresh from the sixteenth-century Spanish Sacra Capilla de El Salvador in Úbeda. The new Marylebone Theatre is a rather less sympathetic fit for their performance: the stage already incongruously set for the current production of A Sherlock Christmas Carol, with Victorian street lamps and a cheerfully painted proscenium arch.
Stile Antico are certainly in top form. The ensemble has already won many accolades for its glorious, perfectly blended sound, created by the tight-knit group of twelve singers whose work is nothing short of mesmerising. This democratic group has no conductor: the singers’ attunement to one another seems magical and their energetic changes of dynamic and pace exhilarating. Although much of the music performed in A Renaissance Christmas is minor key and melancholic, the ensemble conveys a sense of genuine delight in singing together.
Highlights from the programme include Michael Praetorius’s Es ist ein Ros entsprungen and his macaronic Latin/German carol, In Dulce Jubilo. This much beloved work is reprised in Hieronymus Praetorius’s Magnificat quinti toni. In the second half of the programme there are some less-familiar works including the delightful Angelus ad Pastores ait by Rafaella Alleoti and Francisco Guerrero’s A un niño Ilorando.
Stile Antico describe the inspiration for A Renaissance Christmas as the traditional Christmas Eve service of Nine Lessons and Carols. It’s a troubling comparison. King’s College Cambridge much-loved service only came into being in 1918, its first broadcast performance being in 1928. And the appealing notion of there being a canon of Renaissance Christmas music is, sadly, a fiction. So while the musical choices made by Stile Antico for their programme are pleasing, there is little sense of structure, other than a broad one – songs about the coming of the Christ child, then ones which follow his birth.
The chosen readings are particularly problematic. They’re all in period, mainly metaphysical poets (Herbert, Donne, Vaughan, Southwell) and all male except for the welcome inclusion of Emilia Lanier’s ‘Eve’s Apologie in Defence of Women’. Many of the poems, in particular, are complex, difficult to understand on first hearing. So while they are nicely delivered by individual members of Stile Antico, the more challenging readings – especially Donne’s chewy ‘Annunciation’ – would be better served by a professional reader. The other issue is that taken together the readings give little sense of the familiar but awe-inspiring trajectory of the Nine Lessons which spell out the archetypal Christian story.
Reviewed on 7 December 2022
