The Choir of St John's College, Cambridge

The music for this week takes us back to the first Saturday of term weekend of term. The anthem displays Purcell's most gut-wrenching marriage of text and music. After an opening section beseeching God to forgive our own sins and those of our forefathers, he develops two musically opposing themes: 'neither take thou vengeance', a faster moving motif, weaves alongside more drawn-out, chromatic lines, 'but spare us good lord'. Both with similar message build in tension to their summit, 'spare thy people', only to release us from this tension, signalled by an 'English cadence' motif in the tenor, as the music accompanies our own redemption at 'whom thou has redeemed with thy most precious blood'. A final series of pleas finishes the anthem, again with expression taking its lead from the tenors; and a simple ending which recalls the tortured chromatic lines of the central section though omitting the negative 'but', 'Spare us, good Lord'. This prayer is born from humility from the start, the very idea of God remembering our sins in question in the opening bars: 'Remember'...'Remember not, Lord, our offences'.

The canticles are from Tallis's short service in the Dorian mode. Easily mistaken as functional, the setting can without any difficulty be stunning in its simplicity and justifies Tallis's status, still, as one of England's finest composers. He was forced to renounce publicly his own Catholic beliefs and conform to Protestant wishes in his music, with a remit to write only in English and in an intelligible style, eschewing the favoured melismatic polyphony for homophonic writing. What makes Tallis such a hero is that, even within these musical and religious limits, he managed to write the beautiful music which you can hear on this webcast.