The Cambridge Taverner Choir's first recording reflects the research interests of its director Owen Rees: Renaissance polyphony from Portugal. This has two very positive ramifications: first, that this excellent music, totally neglected till now, gets a hearing; and second, that Rees displays a real understanding of the music. This is not to say, of course, that the Cambridge Taverner Choir could or should not record other repertory, but that this is one of those rare (all too rare) examples of scholarship and musicianship combining to result in performances that are both impressive and immediately attractive to the listener.
In many ways, it is the sheer musicianship that distinguishes this recording: Rees's singers are semi-professionals or amateurs who have clearly worked hard to attain the very highest standards of ensemble and intonation we have come to expect from mixed professional groups like The Sixteen or The Tallis Scholars. This choir stands up very well beside these: the sound is distinctive for the softer-grained, transparent quality of the sopranos, and this automatically gives a less top-heavy balance. But it is not only a matter of tone quality. Rees pays particular attention to the balancing of chords—the placing of notes within the overall chordal texture usually being the key to the more homophonic pieces—and the music is thus lit from within in the way the composers represented here must surely have intended. Indeed, there is a wonderful glow about this recording that reflects the skilful engineering on the part of Herald as well as the imagination of the sonority on Rees's part.
The second striking feature of his approach is the emphasis on the meaning of the words, even in such well-known texts as represented here by the Requiem Mass and assorted Marian antiphons. This choir sings of the Day of Judgement or the rejoicing due to the Virgin as if they really mean it: Rees is not afraid to shape phrases, to use dynamics, to vary the intensity of the sound in the service of the words which, though even more familiar to the monks and chapel singers who originally performed these pieces at the monastery of Santa Cruz in Colmbra, would have had an immediacy and a reality for them that it is hard to recapture today. How graphic those texts, in fact, are, and how well this choir brings them to life. This means that music that seems all too conventional, or even boring on the page, is rendered musically and emotionally effective: Pedro de Cristo, Aires Fernandez and Duarte Lobo may not be household names (they are barely mentioned in history books), but they certainly knew what they were doing. The question of 'interpreting' Renaissance polyphony (as opposed to singing through it in tune and with due regard for ensemble) is brought into focus by this recording: Rees is not (as far as I know!) a reincarnation of Pedro de Cristo and we will never know exactly how the composer would have expected to have heard his music performed (he would certainly have been surprised—and very possibly delighted—by women's voices), but Rees's profound knowledge of and commitment to this repertory certainly pay dividends here. I know we Hispanists tend to have an evangelical streak, but, really, rush out and buy this one!'