The third disc in The Cardinall’s Musick’s recording of the complete Fayrfax for ASV Gaudeamus is in many ways their best yet (the previous volumes were reviewed in 6/95 and 1/96). I sense a new maturity in the balance and blend of the group – perhaps this is the best line-up of singers to date – and a more fully-fledged reading of Fayrfax’s music as they become increasingly familiar with his distinctive style.
The centrepiece of this disc is the Missa Albanus, a work probably composed for St Alban’s Abbey with which the composer is known to have had close ties. It is not presented with chant propers – only a 33-second snatch of a fragment of a Matins antiphon for the rhymed office of St Alban from which Fayrfax draws his cantus firmus – in any kind of reconstruction, but is followed by an antiphon motet which was probably also originally composed in honour of the saint but which survives in a version with the text reworked for more general use as a homage to the Virgin. I think I would have been tempted to restore the original Latin poem, O Albane Deo grate, for the recording. In whatever version, there is no denying the quality of the music, both in this extended but always engaging piece, in Aeterne laudis lilium, another massively conceived motet (this time dedicated to St Elizabeth at the request of Elizabeth of York), and in the setting of the Mass itself. Like many of the other composers represented in the Eton Choirbook, Fayrfax is direct and prolix by turn, the text being broken up into contrasted sections, often substantial in themselves (for example, the long-breathed lines at “Et homo factus est” in the Credo), but which explore different vocal combinations and styles. The overall texture is consistently translucent, with The Cardinall’s Musick appropriately sonorous in the tuttis, and graceful in the elaborate passages for solo voices. I have to say, without casting any aspersions on the upper voices, that it was the many passages for tenors and basses (for example, in the “Pleni sunt coeli”) that I found most striking, the voices as rich and smooth as the purest, darkest chocolate.
The group is clearly going from strength to strength, which bodes very well indeed for the completion of the project.'