Nardus Williams/Elizabeth Kenny review – compelling and crystalline duo open Spitalfields festival

Deep inside the Tower of London, the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula was built for the people who lived and worked in the fortress during Henry VIII’s reign. Thomas More is buried there; so is Anne Boleyn. It’s a coolly atmospheric place. For the opening concert of this year’s Spitalfield’s music festival, it was more than a venue: the Tower’s many “ghosts” inspired the programme performed by rising-star soprano Nardus Williams and uber-lutenist Elizabeth Kenny.

There were three short pieces attributed to Henry VIII and songs with texts by Robert Devereux, who became one of the Tower’s many prisoners. Courtly grace crossed such political divides: seated next to Kenny, Williams’s vocal lines were elegantly shaped but unshowy, her ornamentation featherweight, her diction crystalline. Kenny’s brief solo turns poured like liquid, musical lines barely troubled by the percussive quality of plucking.

Balance was presumably a concern (popular long before modern singing technique developed, the lute can be easily overpowered) and Williams hardly projected in these early numbers. In John Dowland’s It Was a Time When Silly Bees Could Speak, though, Williams suddenly sat up, eyes gleaming, her luminous soprano powerfully communicative in the song’s cheeky syncopations.

What followed was even more compelling: Italian songs (fashionable at the Stuart court) in which Williams reached tenderly into her lower register and leaned hard into sustained notes, barely warmed by vibrato. Switching mid-set to the larger, richer theorbo, Kenny illuminated significant elements of dense textures with unhurried virtuosity. By the time Williams – now standing – almost shouted passages in Nicholas Lanier’s dramatic Hero and Leander, her hard, expressive consonants matched by incisive, deeply cleaved lines on the theorbo, any hint of understatement had vanished.

A world premiere closed the programme: The Blacke Songs, a short cycle by baritone and composer Roderick Williams and poet Rommi Smith. The powerful texts explore the stories of three Black Tudors: brothel owner Lucy Baynham, silkweaver Reasonable Blackman and royal trumpeter John Blanke. Generously shaped for the voice, these songs are not-quite-tonal and self-conscious in their references to earlier idioms. The last saw the soprano seesaw across vocal registers over Kenny’s earthy theorbo strumming – haunting echoes of Blanke’s fanfares.