The Renaissance Singers

MICHAEL DRAKE

Wymondham Abbey

This is the year when we can glory in the nine centuries of the Abbey and on Sunday afternoon, music of some antiquity (mostly 16th century) was sung there by a chamber choir formed some 60 years ago in London. Much of that music will have been heard before during the Abbey's history but probably not in this contemporary format.

Directed by JanJoost van Elburg, the singers soon gave Hugh Aston's “Ava Maria” the harder edge of medieval vocal sounds whilst weaving the lines into impressive crescendi, as they did in Edmund Turges's Magnificat. The scale of the work is quite extraordinary but the voices hardly ever flagged.

This scale was surpassed by the “Salve Regini” of William Cornysh (whether senior or junior) who obviously had little sympathy for sopranos and set their line consistently high and again they showed little sign of tiring.