It’s a wet Friday evening and the garden is beginning to come to life again after the recent dry spell: what does this have to do with a concert? The answer is listening to the glorious singing of 12 voices in a concert entitled A Garden of Delights.

St Peter’s Church in Stockbridge welcomed the world-class ensemble Stile Antico who presented a programme that celebrated the beginnings of Spring, the flowering of nature and of love, and the usual renaissance-music themes of nymphs and shepherds.

The 12 unaccompanied voices blended in perfect harmony and created variety within their programme through a judicious grouping of similarly-themed texts and also by varying the number of singers for certain pieces and changing singing positions.

The Bible’s Song of Songs has provided many composers with the challenge to match the gentle (and sometimes quite open) eroticism of this text with music that contains the emotions. Palestrina provided the perfect opening for this concert, for here was music by a master of sacred polyphony but now in a daring situation which serenaded the awakenings of nature and, by implication, the first stirrings of love.

There was a lot more biblical innuendo scattered throughout the concert, all sung with immaculate intonation but also with infectious enthusiasm. Each group of pieces was introduced by a member of the choir, providing a light-hearted yet informative background to the music.

Among the many highlights were the magnificent polychoral exchanges in Tota pulchra es by Praetorius, the beautiful soft singing in Wilbye’s melancholy Draw on, sweet night, the humour in Josquin’s El Grillo (brilliantly punning on his friend’s name) and the wonderfully restrained sensualism of Ceballos’s Hortus conclusus. A stunning performance of Huw Watkin’s commission The Pheonix and the Turtle ended this recital. Fabulous singing!

Duncan Eves,
Goring Field,

Teg Down,
Winchester,

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