The Sixteen are on the road again, with their annual Choral Pilgrimage. Last year the theme encompassed the 400th anniversary of the death of William Byrd, that covert (or not-so-covert) Catholic who flourished – bizarrely – in the reign of Elizabeth I and even under her patronage.
I wonder what her chief minister, William Cecil – who probably did more than anyone to try and stamp out Catholicism in England – would make of the fact that the choir, whose 2024 lineup is made up almost entirely of continental Catholic composers, operates under the patronage of his descendant the Marquess of Salisbury.
