St Nicholas of Myra Church, Dublin

Lamentatio — Music for Holy Week

One of the most popular forms of musical programming is what you might call “total immersion”. A whole evening of Chopin, or Beethoven. An all-French or all-Czech programme.

A festival of American minimalism or the Second Viennese School. And, of course, in Holy Week, there’s music written for Holy Week.

Mark Duley and his choir, Resurgam, refined their programme a bit further.

They presented no less than four Renaissance settings of the

Lamentations of Jeremiah

and ended each half of the programme with Allegri’s

Miserere

.

Allegri’s most celebrated work is a piece surrounded with levels of mystique worthy of a Dan Brown novel. Duley’s presentation of the

Miserere

in two different versions – one incorporating embellishments by Tommaso Bai, as edited by Hugh Keyte, the other, without Bai, as edited by John Rutter – didn’t so much diminish the mystique as add to it.

The embellishments of the Bai version sounded seriously over-elaborate, and the appeal of the music as it has come to be known to recent generations was simply buried in the process of transformation, a process which, however, seems to have delighted listeners well into the 19th century. The evocative calm of the other, more familiar version, with singers placed in front of and behind the audience, wove its expected spell.

Duley chose two settings of the

Lamentations

by famous composers (Palestrina and Tallis) and two by rarely heard figures (Brumel and White), two of them for male voices (Tallis and Brumel), the others for mixed voices.

The best-known of all the settings is the one by Tallis. But the best-sounding one was the setting by Robert White, where the purposeful brightness of the soprano line brought a welcome linear strength to an evening where the music-making had generally concentrated on harmonic resonance over contrapuntal clarity, and favoured glowing, even restful consonance over the surprises, stresses and propulsive potential of dissonant clashes.

One of the most striking aspects of the evening was how strangely the depressing texts it dealt with could be related to the situation in which Ireland finds itself at the moment.

In a week when the latest horrors of Nama had unfolded so vividly, one could not but be struck by the sentiment, “Our bankers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities”.

OK, yes. For fuller effect, I have changed one word. But only one.