Tudor Church Music: The Easter Liturgy – McCarthy

The label calls this Tudor 7210, but what arrives on your desk is really a small piece of the postwar English choral revival, disinterred and dusted off. There’s something touching about that: a document of a moment when the idea of “authentic” Tudor reading was still being invented, before the whole apparatus of countertenors-only, one-voice-per-part, meantone-tuned scholarship descended and, frankly, improved things considerably.

John McCarthy knew what he was doing, even if what he was doing has been superseded. He came up through the ranks as a singer, not a musicologist, and his Ambrosian Singers were built for versatility rather than doctrinal purity. One week Verdi choruses for an EMI opera set, the next week Dunstable. That’s a very different professional culture from the one that produced David Wulstan’s Clerkes of Oxenford a few years later, with their pared timbre and unsentimental attack. McCarthy’s choir sings this Easter liturgy, drawn from the two 1970 LPs originally issued as Die Osterliturgie der Anglikanischen Kirche, with a fullness of tone, a churchy warmth, that owes more to the English cathedral tradition of the 1950s than to any reconstruction of Chapel Royal practice under Edward VI.

Is that a problem? Not entirely. There’s real splendor in the Taverner Benedictus here. The choir lets the melismas unfurl unhurried, without the metrical squareness some rival accounts impose, and Oskar Peter’s organ underpinning (added, of course, not historically present) gives the whole thing a burnished, cathedral-close glow rather than the drier, more astringent sound the a cappella original would have had in a Tudor collegiate chapel. Whether you want that glow is a matter of temperament. I find I do, some days.

The programming has a certain unforced logic: Taverner at one end, William Smith’s Preces and Responses at the other, Smith born in 1603 as if to remind us that “Tudor” music didn’t actually stop when the Tudors did. Byrd and Tomkins carried the language well into the Stuart era, dying only in 1623, by which point the madrigal was old news and Monteverdi was already deep into the seconda prattica on the other side of the Channel. McCarthy centers things on Gibbons, Byrd, Taverner, and Tallis, with single representative pieces from lesser lights: Mundy’s “O Lord, the Maker of All Thing,” modest and lovely, and John Redford’s organ-inflected Creed setting, a reminder that Redford was as much organist as composer, one of those Tudor figures who left barely a biographical trace beyond a handful of pieces in the Mulliner Book.

The choir’s Byrd has dignity without much bite. Tallis fares better. There’s a hushed, granular quality to the softer passages that suggests McCarthy understood, instinctively if not academically, how this repertoire wants space around it, wants the building to finish the phrase for you. English parish and cathedral acoustics do half the composer’s work; you can hear the engineers in 1968–69 trying, not always successfully, to preserve that halo without letting the choir go soft-focus and mushy.

Where the release shows its age is diction and tuning: occasional flat approaches to cadences, sopranos thinning under pressure at the top of the stave, consonants that blur in fast contrapuntal exchanges. Wulstan’s Clerkes, and later the Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips, brought a clarity of inner voicing that simply wasn’t yet part of the technical vocabulary in the late sixties. Nobody had quite worked out yet that less vibrato meant more polyphony.

Still, I’d rather have this than nothing. Collectors of vintage English choral sound, or anyone curious about how this music was understood before the early-music movement got fully organized, will find McCarthy’s Ambrosian Singers good, sincere company. It’s a document, not a definitive statement. Texts are included, English and Latin both, which is a courtesy modern reissues too often skip.

Recommended, with reservations. A snapshot of a transitional decade, sung with conviction if not with the last word in insight.