Review: York Early Music Christmas Festival: Sirinu/Ensemble Laude Novella; National Centre for Early Music, York (From York Press)

Review: York Early Music Christmas Festival: Sirinu/Ensemble Laude Novella; National Centre for Early Music, York

11:24am Monday 12th December 2011 in Music news and reviews By Martin Dreyer

It was a minor miracle that a Latin songbook published in Finland in 1582 ever reached these shores.

For it was nearly three centuries later, in 1853, that our man in Stockholm stumbled on a copy of Piae Cantiones (PC) – full title in English: Old Bishops’ Pious Church & School Songs – and brought it back to the classical scholar James Mason Neale.

He translated several carols and gave them to his musical friend Thomas Helmore, to adjust to the tunes in PC. Without them, we would not have Good King Wenceslas or Good Christian Men Rejoice, to name but two.

Similar collaboration brought together two members of the British group Sirinu and the founding pair from Sweden’s Ensemble Laude Novella, in an enthralling celebration of PC’s Christmas joys. The quartet went even further, by playing and singing up to five different settings of the same piece by late Renaissance composers.

Much the most frequent of these was Michael Praetorius, whose In Dulci Jubilo also illuminates our carolling. It was effective, set for soprano (Sara Stowe) and alto (Ute Goedecke), with rebec and lute. Per Mattsson and Matthew Spring offered decorative fiddle and sinfonye or lute and hurdy-gurdy respectively, while singing occasionally.

It was satisfying to hear songs not known over here, even from PC’s later (1625) edition.

Especially when barely adorned by instruments, these pieces took us to the very fountainhead of the early carol.