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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
December 3, 2004
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By Anna Carol Dudley
The Tallis Scholars brought their customary polish to a Renaissance Christmas program Friday night, presented by Cal Performances at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley. The first half of the program was devoted to music by Palestrina: his motet O magnum mysterium (O great mystery) and a mass based on musical elements from the motet. Ten singers, five men and five women, performed the motet; eight, the mass, with some solo pairings along the way, singing with tight ensemble, flawless intonation and clarity of sound.
So why was it that by intermission, boredom was threatening at least this member of the audience? The Tallis Scholars achieve a kind of perfection; is perfection boring? Or could the great Palestrina be boring? Or is Renaissance music so restricted to a particular tactus (beat) and a particular tonality that a little goes a long way?
The second half, featuring other composers and a striking variety of subjects and styles, helped to enlighten this benighted questioner, and certainly got the Renaissance off the hook. Responsibility for the sameness of the music in the first half must be partly laid at Palestrina's feet. His music was well crafted, but his setting of the wonderful nativity text O magnum mysterium pales in emotional impact in comparison with those of other Renaissance composers, notably Victoria. Maybe there is a good reason why this particular mass is, as noted in the concert program, rarely performed.
Palestrina behind us, the concert was engagingly programmed, starting with the gorgeous Magnificat IV for Double Choir by Orlande de Lassus, in which the basses and tenors in unison chanted some sections and others were assigned to solo quartets, alternating with the full double choir sound. Heinrich Isaac's Regina caeli (Queen of Heaven) also built up the vocal texture as solo voices combined one by one to introduce the sound of the full group. Three very interesting pieces departed from the Christmas theme. Cipriano de Rore's extraordinary Calami sonum ferentes, (The sound of reed pipes) with its rising chromatic lines, bewails the singer's separation from a lover. Benedictus Appenzeller's Musae Jovis (Mourn, o Muses), a heartfelt deploration on the death of the eminent composer Josquin, and Vox in Rama (The voice in Rama) by the Polish composer Mikolaj Zielenski, written for the Feast of the Holy Innocents (those slaughtered by Herod), were extended laments, and the Tallis Scholars are fervent in lamentation. Audiences everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to director Peter Phillips for finding and performing such a wealth of Renaissance music. But brilliant as the programming of this concert became, one still often missed that extra quality of emotional involvement. Contrasts in dynamics and in sound do not seem to be among the Scholars' virtues. The only contrasts come with assigning some sections of a piece to smaller solo ensembles. And in the smaller ensembles as well as in the group as a whole, the singing generally varied from intense to a little more intense.
Opportunities for expressive use of dynamics and vocal color were repeatedly missed, as in Cipriano de Rore's piece, in which the "light Sicilian metre" of reed pipes is compared with the singer's "heavy sighs," and a muse's "sweet song" with the "sad sound of the pipes." Vehemence on words like "malis" was missing from Appenzeller's deploration as it ends (O cruel death... confound you for taking the good and sparing the bad). The last phrase of Rachel's lament in Zielenski's piece, "quia non sunt" (for he is no longer), would be made really chilling by a drop in volume and a change of vocal color. Zielenski's Gaudete insti (Praise the Lord, alleluia), a largely homophonic piece sung by the whole group, made a rousing, delightful ending. The large audience made known its pleasure with sustained applause.
(Anna Carol Dudley is a singer, teacher, member of the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University lecturer emerita] and director emerita of the San Francisco Early Music Society's Baroque Music Workshop.)
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Peter Phillips