Sheppard remains the most puzzling of all Tudor composers. In general, singers love his music: they find the wayward, clashing runs and the unusual textures very exciting. But for the listener—or this one, anyway—there are some worrying problems, particularly when his work is heard alongside Taverner or Tallis; he seems unable to use his dissonances to articulate and propel a passage, and in fact his dissonances are so unexpected and apparently illogical that they often impede the flow of the music; he seems to have no control of harmonic rhythm; and, particularly in the hymn settings, he can clog up the texture so that everything reduces to the oh-so-regular changing of the chant notes.
Still, I seem to be almost alone in this view: the singers on all these records give of their best, the sleeve-note writers gush about his genius, and colleagues in these pages have enthusiastically greeted recent records of his music (2/89 and 1/90). So I do keep trying to admire his music (that's why I was happy to review these records); but I remain slightly puzzled that records of Sheppard keep being issued, whereas—to take a slightly earlier case—the wonderful Ludford remains absent from the catalogue. Perhaps the singers just relish the technical and aesthetic challenge of the music.
Certainly The Sixteen sing with complete commitment. As always they are marvellously controlled and beautifully balanced. Their second volume gives pride of place to Sheppard's most ambitious work, the six-voice Mass Cantate; and they revel in its textures, with Harry Christophers guiding them to a particularly successful final Agnus Dei. For the remainder of these two discs they concentrate on his hymns and responsories, always given complete and with elegantly sung chant sections. What you get here is a wide-ranging panorama of the techniques Sheppard used; and the singers sensitively vary their approach to take account of the styles.
The Cardinall's Musick—a new group, presumably connected with Christ Church, Oxford—make a highly convincing debut on record. Their Sheppard disc builds a Mass for St Stephen's Day around his Mass Be not afraide, which is perhaps the most perplexing of all his works. Using just four excellent solo voices—Andrew Carwood, Andrew Gant, Michael McCarthy and Edward Wickham—they sing the music with infectious relish, savouring the dissonances and presenting nicely clear textures. With a slightly larger ensemble, they add Sheppard's three pieces that specifically mention St Stephen as well as his larger votive motet Gaudete caelicole omnes. They also add, as the longest piece on the record, a rarity: Sampson's motet Psallite felices in honour of Henry VIII, again hardly one of the peaks of Tudor music, but something it is very nice to be able to hear. The chant singing is a touch staid, with too many of the notes sounding equally important; but the polyphony has energy, clarity and persuasive power.'