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William Byrd's Great Service

Michael Zwiebach on July 5, 2011
Pacific Collegium

Most summer concerts are the equivalent of beach reading – the musical versions of vampire romances and spy thrillers. But for those who prefer to heft Gravity's Rainbow to the seaside, there is also a musical equivalent. Christopher Kula, the chief of Pacific Collegium is definitely one of the heavy lifting crowd and his programs never lack for ambition. In a concert at St. Ann's Chapel in Palo Alto, the men and boys of the Collegium sing William Byrd's Great Service – great in terms of size and profundity, but also undeniably a show-off work for a choir that can handle its demands. Byrd, a recusant Catholic all his life, nevertheless worked for a time in Queen Elizabeth's Chapel Royal, so he knew the emerging Anglican service on the highest level. This magnificently elaborate, unaccompanied, choral setting was only discovered in 1920. While not as often performed as Byrd's Latin Mass settings, the Great Service is worth every moment you spend away from the beach and James Patterson's latest.