The magnificent series of recordings by The Cardinall’s Musick under Andrew Carwood has brought the sacred music of William Byrd to a new generation of listeners. Much of Byrd’s Latin output, to which Carwood confined himself, was written for domestic use at a time when it was dangerous to profess Roman Catholicism: the Masses and motets were performed in private chapels, possibly with only a single voice per part. But it’s good to be reminded that Byrd also composed anthems and canticles for the Anglican Church. The grandest of these is the ‘Great Service’, suitable for cathedrals and, as suggested by the title here, the Chapel Royal.

And there’s the rub. The canticles in the ‘Great Service’, spaciously laid out for double choir, need more than 17 singers to make their full effect. One of the selling points is the use of cornetts and sackbuts to double the voices in the ‘full’ sections. They are silent in the ‘verse’ sections, which are accompanied only by the organ, but the small size of the choir makes the contrast between solo and tutti barely noticeable.

In fact the presence of the instruments means that there is a sameness about the sound: splendid in its way, but undifferentiated. It would help if the singing were more characterful: Byrd’s word-painting at ‘He hath scattered the proud’ in the Magnificat goes for little. The other selling point is the use of Elizabethan pronunciation. An interesting experiment on both counts; but turn rather to the Choir of Westminster Abbey: larger forces, organ accompaniment and the music appropriately transposed up by a minor third.