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GRAMOPHONE (12/2016)
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Harmonia Mundi 
HMW906103



Code-barres / Barcode : 3149020610329

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Reviewer: Andrew Mellor

... Byrd’s monolithic motet Infelix ego from Suzy Digby’s ensemble Ora. Do you hear the grain of the polyphony and its twisting strands in this performance? Yes, rather more than from the ultra-smooth Collegium Vocale Gent but nowhere near as much as from the single voices of The Cardinall’s Musick. No surprises there. But Digby does seem more interested in the music’s vertical resonance than its horizontal weave, and the piece can sound oddly homophonic as a result, diminishing those moments when it plunges from polyphony into actual homophony.

Straight after Byrd’s setting comes that by E ¯ riks E≈envalds. But the Latvian’s piece isn’t so much a ‘setting’ as a mash-up of Byrd’s original. I can’t get a handle on it as anything other than an echoing post-script, and that constitutes another way in which this whole disc is a little slippery. The unifying theme is Girolamo Savonarola (he who wrote the text to Infelix) but you have to dig deep into the booklet to get chapter and verse on why that is; he’s not mentioned on the elusive cover and is only vaguely implicit in the poetic title.

Digby opens with Ben Byram Wigfield’s new edition of Allegri’s Miserere, not quite as radically different from the known version as Graham O’Reilly’s but sharing some of the Australian’s distilling features and one alluring chromatic restoration. There’s nothing wrong with the singing but the group can sound light and breathy; Digby is surely the most important performing musician represented on any of these recordings, given the reach and energy of her work, but her ensemble has yet to find its feet.

 

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