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Reviewer: Andrew Mellor
There’s a very particular sound to this recording and it’s one you can trace partially back to Delphian’s 2009 disc of Lamentations settings with the lay clerks of St George’s Chapel, Winsdor (DCD34068). Only two men appear on both recordings; The Queen’s Six is a stand-alone (and far smaller) group that only claims to draw its personnel from the Windsor choir. Yet the unease of ensemble and curious blend of that Delphian release remain here – with only flashes of the plaintive keening and cumulative strength that made its predecessor odd but so very interesting.
The problem is plain and persistent: a light, straight (and also slightly breathy and ‘hooty’) alto sound that sits immediately on top of a first tenor with a gleaming edge and light vibrato, and concrete basses – voices that surely wouldn’t have been cast together in an ensemble that had a wider pool of singers to pick from. Gibbons’s miniature masterpiece Almighty and everlasting God doesn’t blossom, partly because the alto sound is too incongruous to appear in control (as the music dictates it should). That, and there’s another strange hangover from the ‘Lamentations’ disc: a feeling of lament that becomes almost ubiquitous, even in the expression of heartfelt thanksgiving that is Byrd’s O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth. In that sense, much here feels led by ‘sound’ rather than by ‘text’ (words are often hard to decipher); it renders Byrd’s Attend mine humble prayer and Gibbons’s O Lord in thy wrath, among others, strangely directionless.
Full marks to The Queen’s Six for unearthing some delicious and rarely heard Tudor works for men’s voices and for their deft handling of the quickfire polyphony in Gibbons’s Lift up your heads and elsewhere – that they can really do, with top-drawer tuning and rhythmic control. As it is, this would have made an attractive webcast; the superior focus of other ensembles makes it hard to recommend as a paid-for product.
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