Robin Holloway

Heaven before your eyes

issue 30 June 2007

Scripts like sheep, marks dancing out of the ears; but amidst the academic year’s most frazzling fortnight there have been five successive events in Cambridge of pure ecstasy — pleasure more spiritual than carnal — chaste, severe, poised to ‘bring all Heaven before your eyes’.

Thanks to collegiate generosity, the viol-consort Fretwork, finest of its kind, has enjoyed a term’s residency at Sidney Sussex, and just crowned it with evensongs in four other college chapels, each with its distinctive choir, style, building, acoustic, dipping a toe into the sea of 17th-century church music that uses this four-, five-, six-voiced ensemble to support the singers, and adding a rich selection of purely instrumental fantasias to open and close the five services.

Repertoire with one exception was English, from the glorious late Tudor/early Stuart corpus of verse canticles and anthems (alternating solos, duets, trios, etc.,

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