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Bringing Renaissance Notes to Our Ears New York
The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin
09/19/2026 -
William Byrd: Ecce quam Bonum – Mass for Four Voices: Credo & Agnus Dei
William Cornysh: Ave Maria mater Dei
Thomas Crecquillon: Lamentationes Jeremiae
Andrew Smith: Flos regalis
Akemi Naito: Tsuki no Waka
William Mundy: Gyford Partbooks: Kyrie
Hans Leo Hassler: Missa super Dixit Maria: Gloria – Mass for Four Voices: Sanctus & Benedictus
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Sicut cervus-Sitivit anima mea
New York Polyphony: Geoffrey D. Williams (Countertenor), Steve Caldicott Wilson, Andrew Fuchs (Tenors), Craig Phillips (Bass-Baritone)
New York Polyphony at Utstein Kloster, Mosterøy, Norway
(© Nino Felbab)
“Singing is the only way to know where Nature has bestowed the benefit of a good voice: which gift is so rare, as there is not one among a thousand that has it: and, in many,that excellent gift is lost, because they want Art to express Nature.”
William Byrd
“...And how one can imagine oneself among them/I do not know;/It was all so unimaginably different/And all so long ago.”
Louis MacNeice, October
Poet Louis MacNeice in his stunning October was referring to the two-millennia-plus literature of Classical Greece. Yet in a way, he could have been writing about New York Polyphony.
For 20 years (on September 19, exactly), these four gentlemen have plumbed the “archaic” wonders from a mere seven centuries with their spot‑on singing, their color and phrasing. Last night, their works, chosen predominantly from the mid‑16th Century, gave not only singular differences, but personality to their ten composers.
The usual adjective for their music is “otherworldly”. And indeed, within the gorgeous St. Mary the Virgin church with its Cerulean blue backgrounds, one hardly thought of the world outside. Equally, the concord of the four singers was more a solemnity of space and time than the raucous hordes of Saturday night tourists in Times Square.
Yet the composers were hardly other-worldly. The names Palestrina and Byrd were as commonplace to the knowledgeable audience last night as Crecquillon was remote–except to a single painter.
William Byrd was the most astonishing, and his five selections was less otherworldly as lyrical and contrapuntally astonishing. He (and his pal Thomas Tallis) was as serious a Catholic as his benefactress Queen Elizabeth was a Catholic‑hater. But the Virgin Queen knew good toon, Byrd was a toon‑smith, and she adored both treasonous Papists.
Last night, his opening short How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together, could have been anthem for artists and composers together. His Mass is an equally enjoyable masterwork. But to edge in Byrd’s contemporaries, we had only the Credo and Agnus Dei with Thomas Tallis’ Sanctus and Benedictus in the middle.
As for Palestrina... I confess to a boredom with his long Masses. Instead we had a motet with the most glorious first line, from Psalm 42: “As the deer longs for running streams...”
A vast improvement on those disgusting Old Testament sheep sacrifices.
Hieronymus Bosch: Musicians in an egg, reading a score by Thomas Crecquillon
How surprised I was to hear Thomas Crecquillon’s solemn, studious–okay, dismal–verses from the Book of Jeremiah. Especially since I was happily influenced by Hieronymus Bosch’s delicious tribute to those crazy village musicians trying to sing the composer’s notes.
Initially, I thought that Bosch had chosen Crecquillon since they were both Flemish. Listening to Jeremiah, I saw that the music was very difficult, the notes passing from one singer to the next.
The other composers could have been minutely dissected by Renaissance musicologists. But two living composers–both dissonant, both decidedly of our time–both solidified and radiated what poet MacNeice called the useless “libations over graves.”
Andrew Smith illuminated Flos regalis–”the branch of Jesse”–with a vaguely discordant hymn. Yet even these strange chords were fitting to the 14th Century anonymous Flos regalis, written before any published secular inhibitions.
Akemi Naito outdid him with setting the thousand‑year Waka poetry, this on the moon. Not only a lovely sextet written especially for last night’s quartet, but an answer to those who question the age of this imaginative program.
Granted that the older works were written for twice as many voices. New York Polyphony showed that four beautifully different voices– one countertenor, two tenors and one baritone–offered subtle coloration and transparent lines to ancient and eternal masterpieces.
Harry Rolnick
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