An Immortal Legacy – The Sixteen

   in Choir & Organ (Jan, 2014)
The programme is a cleverly interwoven hour of Elizabethan and Jacobean church music and madrigals with clear lines drawn through to Britten, Tippett and MacMillan. The singing is faultless, of course, and effortlessly idiomatic, whether negotiating Tallis’s Salvator mundi or the spirituals from A Child Of Our Time, but there’s no sense of familiar repertoire being run through once more for the microphones. If the music represents two distinct ages of intellectual adventure, the performances reflect some of that existential urgency and excitement. Call it philosophical singing. …