Weelkes Anthems and Madrigals – Consort of Musicke

There is a particular pleasure in hearing English words sung as though the composer had just overheard a conversation and set it down before the ink dried. Weelkes had that gift more than almost anyone of his generation, and this reissue — the Consort of Musicke under Anthony Rooley, with Emma Kirkby’s voice floating above the texture like a candle flame that refuses to gutter — reminds you why cathedral choirs keep coming back to a composer whose personal life, by all surviving accounts, was something of a catastrophe.

Weelkes drank. He was reprimanded more than once at Chichester for public drunkenness, for swearing in the presence of the dean, for what the chapter records delicately call “notorious neglect” of his duties. He died in London in 1623, away from his post, more or less forgotten by the institution he’d served on and off for two decades. None of which matters, except that it explains something about the emotional temperature of this music — its willingness to sit inside grief rather than observe it from a tasteful distance.

Take “When David heard,” the second of the two Absalom settings included here. Weelkes doesn’t rush the anguish. He circles it, repeats “my son, my son” until the words lose ordinary meaning and become something closer to keening, and the false relations bite exactly where they should. Andrew King and Joseph Cornwell trade phrases with an ache that never curdles into melodrama — no small feat, since this piece has been recorded by everyone from King’s Singers imitators to full cathedral forces, and it’s astonishingly easy to oversing.

The consort’s decision to use one voice per part pays dividends throughout. You hear inner lines that big choral tone simply buries — the alto suspension in “O how amiable are thy dwellings,” for instance, barely there, gone in a breath, but it’s the hinge the whole phrase turns on. Mary Nichols and Penny Vickers blend without disappearing into each other, which is harder than it sounds; Weelkes writes contrapuntal lines that want independence even while demanding blend.

The madrigals are where the disc really earns its keep, frankly. “Thule, the period of cosmography” is a small miracle of word-painting — volcanic Iceland conjured through chromatic lurches that must have sounded borderline scandalous to Elizabethan ears, “how strangely Fogo burns” twisting the harmony almost out of its key entirely before it rights itself. Rooley’s group doesn’t sand down the strangeness. Good. Too many recordings of English madrigal repertoire iron out exactly the wrinkles that make it worth hearing.

“Like two proud armies” is fascinating as a piece of musical inheritance — Weelkes lifting the conceit from Striggio’s battle-madrigal tradition and Englishing it, the two choirs of voices lobbing rhythmic volleys at each other like something out of a Gabrieli antiphonal fantasy shrunk down to chamber scale. It’s over in under two minutes and it’s more exciting than pieces three times its length.

Kirkby, predictably, floats through “Hark all ye lovely saints” and “As Vesta was from Latmos hill” with that pure, vibrato-light tone that either enchants you or leaves you cold depending on your temperament — I remain enchanted, four decades into listening to her do this. Some will want more weight, more obviously “expressive” vibrato in the Romantic sense. They should look elsewhere. This is historically informed singing that trusts the composer’s own word-setting to generate the drama, rather than imposing it from outside.

Is everything ideal? Not quite. “Cease now delight,” one of the great laments of the whole English madrigal school, could use another degree of desolation — the chromatic descent toward the close feels slightly polite here, when Wilbye at his darkest or even Dowland’s songs suggest a rawer possible reading. And a few of the shorter anthems, “All people clap your hands” among them, come off almost too tidy, missing some of the exuberance you’d want from a piece meant to accompany actual liturgical celebration.

Still. Set this against the Tallis Scholars’ more polished, more reverberant approach to Weelkes’ sacred output, or against various cathedral-choir anthologies that treat him as a footnote to Byrd and Tallis, and Rooley’s reading feels like the more truthful one — smaller-scaled, textually alert, willing to let the music’s oddities remain odd. Weelkes was an eccentric, a genius on and off, a man whose best work still sounds like nobody else’s. This disc honors the eccentricity rather than smoothing it into something safely “Elizabethan.” That’s exactly right.