^{FIRST PUBLISHED 11 MAY 2025}

28 February 2025 saw the release of the third and final volume in the CD series, ‘In Chains of Gold: The English Pre-Restoration Verse Anthem’, performed by Magdalena Consort (dir. Peter Harvey), Fretwork, and His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts with organist Silas Wollston.

The series was the brainchild of Artistic Director Bill Hunt, one of Fretwork’s founder members, and it began in 2017 with the first recording of Orlando Gibbons’ complete ‘consort’ verse anthems. Whilst including the famous This is the record of John, perhaps the only work of this type that many will ever have encountered, it opened a window onto a huge and largely neglected repertoire to which several of the finest composers of the late Elizabethan and earlier Jacobean periods contributed. The enthusiastic reception of that first release, described in Early Music Review as the ‘finest recording of this quintessentially English music that we are likely to have’ and distinguished as a Critic’s Choice for 2017 in Gramophone, led to the release of further volumes centred around two of the other musical giants of the period: William Byrd in Vol. 2 in 2020, and now Thomas Tomkins in this third, each heard in the context of a host of less familiar names.

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_{John Amner’s consort anthem, ‘Consider, all ye passers-by’, performed by Hugo Hymas with the Magdalena Consort (dir. Peter Harvey) and accompanied by Fretwork, from ‘In Chains of Gold’ - the English pre-Restoration Verse Anthem, Vol. 3}

The term ‘verse anthem’ is still loosely used to refer large body of music that stretches into the later 17th century, with anthems by Purcell, Locke and Humfrey, but ‘In Chains of Gold’ has concentrated principally on the most sumptuous and sophisticated examples of the form in the earlier era — ‘consort anthems’, denoting those that are accompanied by an instrumental consort through-composed in five or six parts, rather than simply by an organ (which is the way that verse anthems are generally performed today in church or cathedral Evensong). The CD series became linked to Bill’s doctoral research into the performance of consort anthems in their own time. That question is specially relevant in this Gibbons centenary year, when many viol consorts may be invited to accompany a choir singing them in a church — a practice for which there is no historical evidence, however desirable it may be for this wonderful music to be heard today.

What might consort anthems originally have sounded like? The recordings in our project set out to recreate, as far as current research allows, many of the probable performance conditions of the time. This was far from an arid academic exercise. The likely format of many surviving consort anthems – voices accompanied by viols – is not unfamiliar to us today, but ‘under the bonnet’ of these new performances there were several significant differences, all closely interlinked.

Firstly, there was a decision to use only the original keys, which would hardly seem a radical position to take but raises a number of important issues. It mostly involved rejecting an inherited baggage of transpositions that were (and remain) standard practice with many choirs when they sing this period of music. Becoming standard practice in the last century, these transpositions were intended to make the voice ranges of the music more compatible with modern SATB ranges and justified, according to a theory now disproved, on the basis of restoring the music to its original performing pitch. We decided in our project to use historical voice-types (e.g. the original part range of ‘Tenor’ being equivalent to that of the modern baritone and ‘Contratenor’ denoting a high, light tenor voice rather than a falsettist) which gives a character to the vocal ensemble that is quite different from the typical Anglican choral sound. We also adopted the relatively high pitch of A466, a close approximation to what research has recently determined to be the historical organ pitch of the period, and these two elements together enabled us to perform all the music in its original key.

Secondly, even the accompanying instruments – a consort of viols in the more intimate anthems and cornetts and sackbuts with organ in the larger ones – were not as they first appear. We used viols that are slightly smaller-scaled than usual (including an original English treble of 1620), enabling them to be completely restrung for the higher pitch and resulting in a strikingly translucent sonority. The brighter tone of the A466 wind was complemented by a reconstructed ‘Tudor’ organ [see the photo above], radically different in tone from the polite, fluty ones that normally accompany choral music of this period today. The combination of all these vivid colours helped us to re-imagine this music in our attempt to rediscover the rhetoric and drama that made the consort anthem such a successful musical form in its own time.

Vol. 3 of ‘In Chains of Gold’ contains two large-scale works by Thomas Tomkins (1572–1656). The first (almost certainly by him though only attributed) is O God, the heathen are come, preserved in the hand of his son Nathaniel in mostly skeletal form. It has received a virtuoso reconstruction by John Milsom and is the longest surviving example of this repertoire: a powerfully emotional reflection on the collapse of social order in the wake of the civil war. The other, Know you not, is the magnificent funeral music that Tomkins wrote on the death of Prince Henry in 1612, here accompanied by the noble wind sonority that would have been traditional for a solemn state occasion. These stand in contrast to several more intimate anthems by his less familiar contemporaries, such as William Stonnard’s Hearken, all ye people, John Amner’s Consider, all ye passers-by, and Richard Nicholson’s When Jesus sat at meat, each perfectly suited to the chamber music scale of a consort of single voices with viols, that would have been typical for domestic musical worship.

As the Gibbons centenary of 2025 takes us full circle back to where ‘In Chains of Gold’ began with Vol. 1 in 2017, it is enlightening to be able to hear in this series of recordings the extraordinary quality of works such as his Behold, thou hast made my days and See, see, the Word is incarnate in the context of consort anthems that other fine composers had written before him, and were writing around him in his own time. They form part of a long-neglected repertoire of English music whose revival is long overdue.

by Bill Hunt

In Chains of Gold: The English Pre-Restoration Verse Anthem, Vol. 3 was released on 28 February 2025 on Signum Records. Purchase your copy here or stream on Spotify and Apple Music. The recording project was supported by a grant from Continuo Foundation alongside other private donors.