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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
December 10, 2003
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By Michelle Dulak
The Tallis Scholars have fascinated and irritated scholars of Renaissance music for almost thirty years now. The incredible
technical control and the lovely vocal timbres were always things to marvel at; but there were, shall we say, "issues" about the
handling of the music. (Cadential ficta — the conventional raising of a leading tone at a cadence — were a particular
problem. Peter Phillips, the Tallis Scholars' director, doesn't "do" ficta. I'll never forget lending an early-16th-century Tallis
Scholars CD to an eminent UC/Berkeley professor and getting it back with the comment that it was very beautiful, but that he wished
he'd had a bag of sharps to go with it.)
The ficta problem disappears in the middle of the 16th century, and so Wednesday's program at First Congregational Church in
Berkeley was blissfully free of weirdly modal cadences and the like. The first half was dedicated entirely to Philippe de Monte, a
composer I'd known only as a madrigalist. On the evidence of this program, he was a very fine composer of sacred music as well, and
other ensembles ought to be prowling around what is apparently a huge catalog — 38 Masses, 250+ motets . . . The Laudate
Dominum the Tallis Scholars performed, with its almost jazzy syncopations, was fun; the "Peccantem me quotidiae" (Sinning
daily) that followed was pensive and hushed.
What followed was a large double-choir mass, styled "Missa sine nomine" (i.e., "without a nickname"). The style was odd, if
anything a lot more conservative than Palestrina and a lot more relentlessly contrapuntal in style. The counterpoint let up in a
few obvious places (e.g., "Et incarnatus"), but only a few.
 Nonetheless, the piece certainly gave the audience an opportunity to savor the singing of the Tallis Scholars. This is an incredibly disciplined chamber choir. The blend and even the uncannily pure intonation might be duplicated elsewhere, but hardly the control of counterpoint; every singer seems to know at every time where his or her line is going, and to make of it a perfect arc. Perhaps it has something to do with the longevity of the choir; out of curiosity, I took out my sixteen-year-old Tallis Scholars recording of the Victoria Requiem, and found that six of Wednesday's ten singers had sung on it. Of course the Allegri Miserere has practically been a Tallis Scholars visiting card ever since their first recording of it, I think more than twenty years ago. Still, it was eerie to hear it done so well by ten singers. One tenor, handling the plainchant, took up a station midway along the far left aisle; the solo choir of four stood at the far end of the sanctuary; and the remaining "main" choir of five were front and center. The piece alternates between the two choirs, with plainchant in between. The "big" choir's music is expressive, but it's the "solo" choir that gets to show off. I've tried to find out which of the Tallis sopranos was nailing the high C every verse, but I haven't been able to discover who it was. In any case, she ornamented the last two repetitions with singular grace and skill, and her colleagues followed her meticulously. The tenor recitant paused oddly between each of his paired lines, but he certainly sang every note allotted to him beautifully. As for the Palestrina half of the program, it could hardly have been better chosen, nor better sung. It was almost all double-choir music, but here the singers weren't deliberately separated (in fact, they just convened in a shallow arc round Phillips). You would not think that arrangement would work for antiphonal-choir music, but it did — partly, I think, because the darker voices were in Choir II, so that there was a timbral difference without much spatial distance at all. The wonderful antiphonal Stabat Mater (the one Wagner loved so much that he orchestrated it) was there, with an intricate Magnificat and a serene setting of the Nunc Dimittis. The best, though, was maybe the simplest: a four-part Alma redemptoris mater (for which two of the sopranos sat out, leaving two on a part) — intimate and deep, solemn without being sad. (Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.) ©2003 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |
Peter Phillips