Attende domine – Music for Lent & Passiontide
Works by Byrd, Mendelssohn, Poulenc et al
The Bevan Family Consort
Signum Classics SIGCD892 69:18 mins
Clip: David Bevan – Psalm 21 (The Bevan Family Consort)
The latest offering from the Bevan Family Consort is an album of varied choral works composed for Lent and Passiontide. These are singers whose childhoods were steeped in Catholic church music, and many pieces featured have personal significance to them, not least a dramatic, unsettling setting of Psalm 21 by David Bevan (father to several performers, uncle to others) and a Good Friday piece called The Reproaches by Colin Mawby, choir director at Westminster Cathedral and a family friend.
Some of the pieces are recorded here for the first time: not only newer works, but also extraordinary, long-forgotten ones by the Renaissance composers Girolamo Giacobbi, Andrea Rota and Alfonso Ferrabosco, all of them rediscovered and edited by one of the singers, early music editor Francis Bevan.
Though the Consort brings together acclaimed international opera singers with cousins or siblings for whom singing is merely a hobby, the ensemble is consistently faultless: attention to blend and diction are strikingly precise. By definition, the mood of the album is solemn, but variety is provided not only in the different ages and styles of the works, but in the approach taken to them.
Earlier music is sung with a crystalline tone, each choral line sounding as a single voice. (‘Christus factus est’ is particularly evocative of the purest sense of peace.) Elsewhere, a far more sumptuous, expressive tone is adopted for numbers by Duruflé, Poulenc, Mendelssohn and Bonis. Scholarly, devout and sung with the sincerest commitment, this album is a passionate project indeed. Alexandra Wilson
