Performance "riveting musically and dramatically" is preserved in this live concert recording of the celebrated Quire Cleveland. We know very little about the composer Richard Davy. He was a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, around the time it opened its doors on the present site, and he was informator choristarum (master of the choirboys) there from 1490 to 1492. After that, we’re not sure. He may have worked at Exeter Cathedral, he may have worked for the Boleyn family, and he probably ended his days at Fotheringhay, which later gained fame as the 1587 site of the trial and beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. But that’s all we know. Davy’s setting of the St. Matthew Passion is the earliest by a known composer. It is preserved in the Eton Choirbook, a splendid music manuscript from the early 16th century, mostly containing motets in honor of the Virgin Mary, one of which is described as composed in a single day by Davy while he was at Magdalen College. At the very end of the book is this very unusual piece—out of the norm, not only for this manuscript, but for musical composition in general up to that time. Following the tradition of Passion performance in the Middle Ages, Davy’s Evangelist and Jesus sing their parts using Sarum chant for the Passion, which is to say, according to the Rite of Salisbury, which was preferred over the Roman Rite in England up to the Reformation in the mid-16th century. The sayings of everyone else—the disciples, Cayphas, Pilate and his wife, the rabble, the Centurion, and so on—are set by Davy in polyphony, with four voice parts. The musical style of the Eton Choirbook demonstrates clearly that the brilliant English choral writing we know, from Byrd to Purcell to Howells to Mealor, was already flourishing in the early Renaissance. There are soaring treble lines, originally written for boy sopranos—high above the alto—vibrant syncopations, and flashes of florid writing with rare, but highly effective, homophonic passages (where all the voices sing the same rhythm). It’s truly an emotional and dramatic rendering of the Gospel for the Passion, which is why it is sometimes referred to as a “dramatic” or “scenic” passion—something we have carried over into our division of the piece, with each track of the CD representing a scene in the story. Unfortunately, the pages containing the beginning of the piece in the Eton Choirbook have been lost, and of the forty-two original short movements, the book as it survives lacks the first eleven movements completely, and has only alto and bass voices for the next twelve. Starting in 1921, scholars have tried reconstructing the missing portions. For the movements at the beginning, they used music from later movements and substituted the missing words. I have done the same, although my choices have been based on analytical criteria that do not seem to have been used by earlier scholars. The next twelve movements require composing the two missing voices, according to the style of the rest of the piece. All of that makes the work performable. The further wrinkle for our version is that I have set Davy’s music, not to the original Latin words, but to the early English Gospel translation by William Tyndale. Tyndale began his translation of the New Testament while he was still a student at Magdalen in the early 16th century, so his work comes from the same artistic milieu as Davy’s music, although it is probably just a few years later. Translating scripture was still illegal and eventually caused Tyndale to be martyred as a heretic—strangled and burned at the stake—even though a Bible in English, largely his work, was authorized by Henry VIII just three years later. Not only was Tyndale’s English translation so poetic that it eventually became the basis for the King James Bible in 1611, but Tyndale was so adept at capturing the essence of natural spoken dialogue that the story seems vivid and real, and helps the work come alive for us today. The Passion of St. Matthew concludes, based on the Gospel reading for Palm Sunday, after the Evangelist describes the visit to the tomb by the three Marys. Immediately afterwards, we sing an Easter carol by the composer Sheryngam, whom we know only from two pieces in the Fayrfax Manuscript (from the same period as the Eton Choirbook). Late medieval English mystery plays sometimes followed the crucifixion with an imagined dialogue between Jesus and another character or characters. Sheryngam’s Ah, Gentle Jesu serves a similar purpose here. In this case, the dialogue is with “a sinner,” who appears in the refrain, or burden, and in the final verse. The rest of the lyric is Jesus, admonishing the sinner to contemplate the crucifixion and what it means. Performing passion music, particularly settings that have not previously been recognized as “official” masterpieces, has become a controversial act in modern times, since it may revive old prejudices and perpetuate the blaming of the Jews for Christ’s death. The point of this recording is to show what beautiful music was composed to set the passion 500 years ago, and how surprisingly vivid and heartfelt—and human—the presentation can be for modern audiences. Each character plays a crucial part—Jesus, the disciples, the chief priests, the rabble, Pilate—and without any one of them there would be no passion: no crucifixion, no resurrection, no salvation, no Christianity.There is no orchestra in Davy’s passion, as there is in Bach’s, no extended movements of grandeur and agony, no exquisite instrumental obbligato or poignant aria—just the purity of unaccompanied solo and choral voices. But Davy’s work is equally profound in its eloquent juxtaposition of the dignified chant and brief flashes of dramatic polyphony, and it deserves to be heard as an extraordinary work of art, and a pioneering venture in setting the passion story to music. —Ross W. Duffin N. B. The Greek word "pascha" normally meant the Christian festival of Easter, so that’s what Tyndale used in his New Testament translation. It was awkward to refer to the feast of Christ’s resurrection before it happened, however, and when he afterwards translated the Old Testament, Tyndale coined a new English word—"Passover"—which has been used ever since.