Taverner and Gibbons – Willcocks

Fifty years on, that Argo LP still sounds like a document from an age when English cathedral choirs were just beginning to figure out what to do with the Tudors, and weren’t entirely sure they should trust the material to speak for itself.

David Willcocks led the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, into music that had gone largely unheard on records, and the enthusiasm shows. So does the discomfort. Taverner’s Western Wynde Mass takes its cantus firmus from a bawdy little secular song, “Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,” and threads it through all four movements, sometimes in the treble, sometimes buried in the tenor, always meant to be felt rather than flaunted. Willcocks and his trebles flaunt it. The tune rides high and bright above the texture throughout, English cathedral style, the way descants are added to hymns for the last verse. It’s thrilling in its way. It is not, I think, what Taverner had in mind.

Taverner wrote for men and boys at Oxford and later at Tattershall, in a soundworld we can only partially reconstruct. No one alive heard those voices, and the acoustics of a 1962 recording, however sympathetically engineered by the Decca team, cannot un-ring that bell. What we get instead is King’s chapel at its most resplendent: the famous fan vaulting doing something to the sound that no disc captures accurately, a wash of reverberation that softens the polyphony’s edges even as the trebles cut through it like a knife through cream.

And yet, I confess I enjoyed this more than memory had led me to expect. There’s a briskness to the tempos, an unwillingness to wallow, that keeps the Mass moving. Compare late Tallis Scholars recordings, gorgeous but sometimes glacial, and you’ll find Willcocks gets through the Agnus Dei rather faster, with less time to admire the vaulting and more sense of ritual momentum. The “Kyrie le roy” that opens the disc, not part of the Mass proper since English Masses of this period customarily omitted the Kyrie, leaving it to plainchant or a separate polyphonic setting, sounds foursquare here, almost stolid, but it does its liturgical job: clearing the throat before the main event.

The shorter motets fare variably. “Dum transisset Sabbatum” wants tenderness at the word aromata, the spices the three Marys carry to the tomb, and Willcocks’s choir, forthright as ever, doesn’t quite catch the hush of that image. Stile Antico, decades later for Harmonia Mundi, luxuriate in exactly that moment. Here it passes by almost brusquely. “Mater Christi” and “Christe Jesu pastor bone” are sturdier fare and suit the King’s sound better. Less to conceal, less delicacy required.

The Gibbons pairing makes for an odd but not unwelcome bedfellow. “This Is the Record of John,” with its verse-and-chorus structure alternating soloist against full choir, gives us early Tudor… no, wait, Jacobean, polyphony of an entirely different character: leaner, more speech-driven, closer to Byrd’s consort songs than to Taverner’s melismatic weave. The solo verses are handled with real style, the boy soloist unforced and true of pitch, though the microphones sit close enough that you can hear the intake of breath before each phrase, a small intimacy I rather treasure on old recordings like this. The Te Deum and Jubilate from the Second Service bring the Jacobean Consort of Viols into play, and there’s a lovely blend of bowed string tone with choral polyphony that anticipates, in embryo, the verse-anthem tradition Purcell would inherit and transform.

Should you buy it? The Byrd coupling on the old Double Decca twofer is apparently vanishing from circulation, though Newton Classics has kept the Western Wynde Mass in print, paired again with Byrd. That’s probably the way to own this: as a historical document, valuable for what it tells us about how one generation of English choral musicians rediscovered another, four centuries removed. For a modern, more historically informed Western Wynde Mass, I’d point you toward the Sixteen or the Tallis Scholars, with greater transparency and more sensitivity to the cantus firmus’s proper role as substructure rather than tune. But for a sense of King’s as it sounded under Willcocks at the height of his powers, confident, resplendent, occasionally willful, this earns its place on the shelf. Just don’t mistake it for the last word on Taverner. It was, at the time, very nearly the first.