Secret Byrd at Kilkenny Arts Festival review: Exquisite singing, quietly searing playing

Irish Times

13 hours ago

Secret Byrd
Black Abbey, Kilkenny
★★★★☆
Secret Byrd, an immersive music event, explores the idea that your music can get you in trouble. The stories of musicians ranging from Kneecap, Pussy Riot and (formerly) the Dixie Chicks to Stravinsky, Mahler and Shostakovich show the kinds of popular or official consequences that can arise when music is mixed with faith or opinion.
It was the same for the great English Renaissance composer William Byrd. Being Catholic but writing music – notably church music – for the Protestant English court meant the defiant Byrd relied on the favour of Queen Elizabeth I to shield him from the worst of the punishments others suffered for failure to attend weekly Anglican Communion services or for participating in underground Catholic Masses.
Secret Byrd converts the Black Abbey, Kilkenny's 13th-century Dominican priory, into the interior of a well-off Catholic household, centred on a large round table, the entire space lit only by candles, representing the kind of domestic setting where illicit Masses took place. The all-male vocal ensemble the
Gesualdo Six
appear in 16th-century servant costumes and move around, separating and regrouping, or sitting at the table. The audience also move about, some taking up invitations to join the singers at the table.
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Despite this carefully engineered atmosphere the audience feel free to chat during the 20 minutes before the action proper begins, this while the outstanding viol consort
Fretwork
is giving quietly searing performances of music by Byrd and his contemporaries. Conversation ceases, however, the minute the singing for the outlawed worship begins, in this case the opening Kyrie from Byrd's Mass for Five Voices.
It's no wonder. The sound is breathtaking. This Mass – as with Byrd's other two, for Four Voices and Three Voices – is exquisite, and in this moment it's hard to imagine a more compelling performance. The near-flawless unanimity of vocal sound in tone and vowels, as if a single brain were controlling the vocal production of five people, is in beautiful contrast with the individuality of musical shaping that each of Byrd's polyphonic lines requires.
Instrumental pieces separate the Mass movements, with voices and instruments eventually joining together for the motet Infelix Ego, which recounts a martyr's preparation for death, and the solo countertenor Guy James in the consort song Ye Sacred Muses, Byrd's elegy on the death of Tallis.
The presentation of important historical context – printed on a series of wall hangings – is a little hit and miss given restrictions on light and time. But there is no mistaking the central message when the Mass's closing Agnus Dei is abruptly interrupted by ferocious pounding on the abbey door. The singers panic, hushing each other, extinguishing all candles, and then hiding from view before the one acting as the priest is spirited away to safety, presumably to a priest hole.
Secret Byrd's staging is directed by Bill Barclay, who says, 'We artistic types tend to look at the world and vainly wonder how we could improve it. Why not look to Byrd and consider what he is still saying today?'