FOR their recent Baroque concert, the gifted Swarbrick Singers migrated to the village of Brixworth, a few miles north of their home base of Northampton — with good reason. All Saints’, Brixworth is one of the oldest, largest, and most complete Anglo-Saxon churches in England. Dating from the late 600s, it has been claimed as “the finest Romanesque church north of the Alps” — an exaggeration surely; but certainly the finest north of France in the UK.
Aside from the interest of this attentive and proficient chorale’s precision and universal excellence, they chose this time to devote their concert to a significant anniversary, somewhat overlooked: exploring the choral music — a Mass and a substantial setting of Dixit Dominus (Psalm 100, “The Lord said unto my Lord”) — of the eldest Scarlatti, Alessandro.
Although immensely influential on the succeeding generation, Alessandro (1660-1725), an almost exact contemporary of Purcell, has tended to be overlooked in favour of his son, Domenico, born in the same year as Bach and Handel. Another composer son, Pietro, made an impact in Naples; but Alessandro’s other most important relation was his younger brother Francesco, for whom a compelling case has recently and successfully been made by the Warwick-based Armonico Consort.
The Swarbricks are in the same top league. Their unfailing finesse must be laid at the door of their director, Ian Clarke: meticulous rehearsal, intensely well-researched preparation, inculcation of fine detail, drawing out of perfect tuning, and overall authority expressed in perceptive conducting worked together here to produce high quality.
Setting Alessandro alongside, for example, Henrich Schütz (Blessed are the dead: the text famously included in Brahms’s German Requiem), like Monteverdi the founder of the evolving Baroque, provided a striking indication of how Scarlatti bridged the gap between the emerging and the mature (18th-century) Baroque. Palestrina’s Exultate Deo as well as Byrd’s English treatment of the same psalm text confirmed how, even before 1594, new formulae were pointing a way forward.
In Scarlatti’s Mass for Eight Voices, what told was the fine balancing of the vocal lines and the capturing of the many astonishing contrasts that the composer weaves throughout; such as an unexpected hushed passage midway through the Christe, eleison; then a daring, almost balletic final Kyrie. The work is strewn with the most amazing filigree effects lured out by Clarke’s left hand, almost like musical fan-vaulting, technically recalling the decorative expertise of late-15th-century composers.
The shifting volumes amid the Credo, a potent silence heralding the Crucifixus, the enchanting upper voice-led Sanctus (similar launching the Agnus Dei), with unexpectedly contrasted Osanna, all beguiled the intellect as well as the ear. The opening of the Dixit Dominus falls short of Handel, but some of what follows is superlative — and was superlatively sung.
Where Alexander Scarlatti does advance into the seconda prattica (emergent Baroque), he unfolds many several exciting passages of marked panache. A few sequences lack the urgency of the Mass, but many match it, like an attractive short, possibly four-part fughetta that could easily have been by Gibbons. It was the ability of composer and choir to spring surprises which made this concert feel vibrant and constantly arresting.