Early music on DVD is a fairly rare phenomenon. The Consort of Musicke’s cornucopia of Italian madrigals and The Tallis Scholars’ visual feast in the Sistine Chapel are two examples that spring to mind. Both of these enjoyed only limited success.

In 2002 The Tallis Scholars recorded an audio-visual Byrd-fest in three parts: a concert-format sequence of some of his sacred music in English and Latin in the atmospheric (and stunningly lit) setting of Tewkesbury Abbey; a documentary of Byrd’s life and his relationship to his powerful patroness, Queen Elizabeth I; and, as an ‘audio bonus’, another outing for The Tallis Scholars’ version of the three Byrd Masses, recorded in Merton College Chapel, and still one of the best ever made (Gimell, 3/86).

Charles Hazlewood, aka Mr Classical Music- on-the-Small Screen, fronts the documentary; David Starkey he’s not, nor even classical music’s answer to Jamie Oliver, but casually attired and casually unshaven, he has a degree of ease, if not exactly charm, in front of the camera. He traces adeptly and fluently the different phases of Byrd’s career, with stunning visuals of Lincoln Cathedral, the Chapel Royal and Ingatestone Hall as the impressive backdrops to his compositional creativity. The focus on Byrd’s position as a Catholic composer working in Protestant England lends his biography a broader fascination, and I enjoyed the ironic, even slightly mischievous, attempts to make that story relevant to today with shots of Heathrow airport when the discussion turned in the direction of the suspicions that fell on Catholics visiting England (‘carefully watched arrivals and departures’) and of traffic cameras when spies were mentioned. The whole is lent authority through the erudite but accessible contributions of experts on Reformation England (Christopher Haigh) and Byrd’s music (David Skinner). Hazlewood sums up by talking about the hidden depths of passion in Byrd’s music, and its range, although, inevitably, given the slant of the documentary, Byrd’s development as a composer of church music is what is traced, and we are given only background snippets of his keyboard or consort music. Nevertheless, the tale is well told, not least with added visual elements such as shots of 16th-century documentation, the original printed editions of Byrd’s music and his own, quite beautifully penned autograph.

As to the performances, it was very interesting to hear Peter Phillips emphasize the passionate nature of Byrd’s sacred music (much of which, as David Skinner points out, is an allegory of the Catholic situation – and therefore Byrd’s own – in Elizabethan England), when this aspect comes across as fairly understated in The Tallis Scholars’ performances. This is not to say, however, that they do not have a high degree of intensity at times: on the whole, they capture the ebb and flow of the music very well, but there is a sense of distance. Phillips talks of getting right inside, of ‘ticking along with the music’, and that is what he does above all: he serves to keep the tactus of the music while the singers allow ‘the words to wrap the music’ in exactly the way Phillips describes in his interview with Hazlewood. This may not be the only way to perform Byrd’s music – and it would have been good if the documentary had explored questions of performance practice more than it did – but it is still very impressive in the ethereal clarity of the overall sound and in the total commitment and rare understanding resulting from these musicians’ years of experience.

I hope this fascinating and beautiful DVD does as well as it deserves to; remember, you don’t have to compete with demands for the playstation or restrict yourself to the immobility of the living room DVD player – I experienced it on my Apple G4 Powerbook and Bose headphones: bliss.