The singing here is first rate. The Sixteen are a beautifully-balanced ensemble with superb intonation and a gentle, focused tone. Harry Christophers allows the lines to flow freely and gives the music space to breathe. Commenting on an earlier recording of theirs (Meridian E77039, 11/81), IF noted that some of their speeds were too brisk. None of that here: the music runs gently, tastefully and sensitively. The words may be too soft-edged for some tastes, but this is surely not music in which harsh consonants should be allowed to impede the shape of the lines. Here shape is practically everything.
It is worth pausing for a moment on the quality of this singing. The extraordinarily rich Cathedral tradition at Oxford and Cambridge has received an important extra stimulus in the ten years or so since more of the colleges opened their doors to women. Mixed-voice choirs that are imbued with that tradition and can give a superb account of Cathedral music are now relatively common; but they still seem to be confining their recordings to the smaller companies and to small-budget productions. In many ways this is well and good: here and in other choirs of the same kind you will find none of the bored efficiency that often goes with more fully-financed operations. But there are resources here that could so easily be developed. I hope Hyperion realize what a treasure they have.
Purely in terms of sound and musicianship, then, the record is a treat. Slightly more problematic is the music of Fayrfax. Apart from his sharply-chiselled secular songs, little of his music has appeared on record; and that is partly because his sacred works stand in a funny noman's-land. Fayrfax avoids the excesses of glorious texture and endless roulade that make the music of the previous generation so impressive; but he has none of the wonderful sense of colour, line and harmonic nuance which we find in the slightly later music of Ludford and Taverner. It is rich music, but in certain ways slightly bland; his harmonic progressions are often gauche (though not quite so bad as they might seem from the published edition of his works, followed rather too closely in the performance of the Missa Albanus—notice in particular the crashing, and quite incorrect, parallel fifths at the end of the first Osanna—but much improved on for the motet); and shape seems an unimportant consideration for him. The music might have seemed more compelling if the reduced-voice sections had been sung by soloists, as the composer surely intended.
So while it is good to have a mass and a motet of Fayrfax so splendidly recorded—he is after all an important figure in the history of English music—I hope that The Sixteen will soon record something more worthy of their talents.'