Bath Mozartfest (3) – Sitkovetskys and Tallis Scholars

My husband went to hear the regular Festival visitors, the Sitkovetsky Trio, give a lunchtime recital at the Guildhall. They were not quite on their best form. Haydn’s ‘Gypsy Rondo’ trio worked well but Schubert’s D929 trio is rambling and they didn’t really find an inventive solution to this.

I was lucky to get a ticket to the Tallis Scholars’ concert in St Mary’s Bathwick as there was just one left in the =main aisle. I last heard them in Merton College Chapel in a fundraising concert. The programme ‘The Path to Purcell’ didn’t pretend to connect to Mozart and I wondered whether it might be linked to a forthcoming recording? I’m not complaining as it’s one of my favourite areas of repertoire.

Most of the music was pieces I’ve sung and in a number of cases am very familiar with. We got both Tomkins’ and Purcell’s settings of My Beloved Spake and O Sing unto the Lord. I have sung many performances of Tomkins’ canticles and of course the Responses, but only isolated ones of his anthems, which don’t seem to have found a very firm niche in the repertoire. Other composers represented were Gibbons and Pelham Humfrey.

The Purcell component was very much a selection of the ‘greatest hits’ among his anthems. I noticed that they went for the unusual variant of Eb and Db at the end of bar 63 in the alto part of Jehovah, quam multi sunt hostes mei. This imprinted on me because I discovered the anthem via a broadcast from Salisbury Cathedral which used it, but I’d never heard it since then until now! Now when am I ever going to sing My beloved spake?

Different singers were used in the different pieces, moving so nimbly around between them (they must be very practised at this) that one barely noticed. The performances were as polished as you’d expect from this group, with timbres of the individual voices distinguishable, yet blending with one another. Accompaniment was provided where necessary by James McVinnie on an imported chamber organ (not the Willis on Old Philharmonic pitch which lives in the church!) There were many I knew in the audience and the mood was set by lighting our seating with candles.

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