Harry Christophers's celebrated choir, The Sixteen, made its third visit to Northern Ireland on Thursday and Friday for a pair of Belfast Festival concerts in the city's two cathedrals. The first programme was devoted entirely to British music by four composers, the early glories of William Byrd and Thomas Tallis juxtaposed with works from the last century by Benjamin Britten and John Tavener.
This was no routine, chronologically-ordered sequence of music, but one that leapt forwards and backwards in a way designed to provoke the listener to make connections - similarities between pieces by Tavener and Britten, for instance, that mightn't otherwise be immediately obvious.
The Sixteen's sound is smooth and generous, the intonation true, the phrasing confident in its long trajectories, the tone almost always well focussed - the occasional tendencies towards over-ripeness that occur arise in the men's voices rather than in the women's. The choir encompassed with ease the extremes that Tavener challenges them with, the pared-down setting of Blake in The Lamb, on the one hand, the grandly indulgent Hymn to the Mother of God for double choir, on the other.
Similar extremes were explored in the early repertoire, too, from the unperturbed calm of Tallis's If ye love me, for men's voices, to a range of pieces with those scrunching English dissonances, which Christophers treated without an avidly direct embrace, but rather acknowledge , as it were, from a respectful distance.
From the back of the cathedral (where the opening items by Byrd were marred by the sounds of money being counted or put away) the rhythmic contours came across more well-rounded than incisive. It's part of a style that's at all times better gauged to be uplifting than to challenge or provoke. The extent of the extraordinary uplift experienced by Thursday's audience was made fully clear at the end of the evening, when, knowing their own value, the choir waited through unusually prolonged applause before allowing themselves to be encouraged back for the greatly desired encore.
