Finally, Auntie shows she cares about music
By Michael White
18 April 2008

For ages now the BBC seems to have assumed that music documentaries have no place on television unless they're either populist or packaged with ingratiating triteness and a quasi-hip presenter more interested in himself than in what he's there to present. But then, just as it looked as though the ambitions of even BBC Four would never extend beyond Dusty Springfield reminiscence nights, came Sacred Music, the series that ended last weekend and restored your fading faith that anyone in television cared about such things or had the clout to get them scheduled.

Sacred Music could have been a mess: a scramble through nine centuries of choral writing done with silly graphics, 15-second information bites, and celebrity gardeners who like Bach. Instead, it was a well-presented, thoughtful, serious piece of work that focused purposefully on four key moments in the earlier history of the repertoire: experiments in decorating plainsong melody by Leonin and Perotin in Gothic France; the flowering of polyphony under Palestrina in Renaissance Italy; subservience of style to politics in the Tudor England of Tallis and Byrd and Bach's enrichment of the Reformation in north Germany.

Of course, this was selective: it excluded names you might have wanted in. But selectivity allowed time for the selling-point of the series, which was meaningful chunks of music - largely performed by Harry Christophers' immaculately period-conscious choir The Sixteen - in the sort of spaces for which it was written. Cue: neck-stretching camera-pans of St Denis in Paris, St John Lateran in Rome, or the Marienkirche, Lübeck.

The only problem was that, for reasons of what I assume was thrift, the BBC then sold the idea short. For Perotin it was prepared to send Christophers and three singers to Paris for a day's filming. But when it came to Palestrina, flying out the whole Sixteen to Rome was clearly not within a BBC Four budget, so we had to make do with them singing in an Italianate church in Clerkenwell, padded out with shots of where they should have been and clips of real on-site stuff done by real on-site Italian choirs.

What's wrong with that, you ask. Well, real Italian choirs these days, even the ones with grand addresses, leave a lot to be desired; and the ones heard here were living proof. It would have been infinitely preferable (not to say linguistically cute) to have done the job properly and had the Sixteen in the Sistine. And I wish, too, that we'd had them in Leipzig and Lübeck rather than the London Lutheran church that was the compromise for the Bach programme.

Still, for Byrd and Tallis the appropriate venues came easy; so it was good to hear Christophers' wonderful singers in Waltham Abbey, where Tallis was on the staff, and at Ingatestone Hall, the private house for which Byrd wrote his domestic-scale Mass-settings in times when such things couldn't be sung in an English church.

In fact, the Byrd and Tallis programme made the strongest story in the series, examining two composers in church service who managed to survive three changes of state religion as the crown passed from Henry to Mary to Elizabeth, with roller-coasting requirements for liturgical music. Professionalism, pragmatism, compromise - whatever the word, it kept them their heads and, privately, their faith in that they stayed Catholics to the end, even when working for a Protestant Chapel Royal. Elizabeth, herself a pragmatist, was happy not to notice. And it's a pity that Byrd's local parish was less accommodating as it persistently fined him for failing to attend its (Anglican) services.

If there was one overall story in the series, it was about Church and music as a shotgun marriage: mutually dependent, mutually suspicious. Worship flourishes in song; but when the singing voices steal the show, the Church gets touchy - hence the Council of Trent, and other attempts through history to curb the brilliance of composers who had previously been courted.

It's a tense relationship that runs on. And if Sacred Music gets a second series to run the story beyond Bach - which it surely deserves - I just hope it gets the same presenter. Simon Russell Beale may have been speaking someone else's words most of the time, but that's what actors do; and as someone raised in cathedral music (a boy chorister at St Paul's) but now out of it, he struck the perfect balance of intelligent, informed observer. Knowing nothing about gardening (dear BBC take note) was not a handicap.