Palestrina - The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips

The Tallis Scholars sing Palestrina
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
Gimell CDGIM 204

Palestrina is the composer The Tallis Scholars have sung and recorded most frequently. There need be no surprise in this: the quality of his music merits all the fame it has been accorded over the centuries, making him probably the most talked-about writer in the history of Western classical music (Beethoven, Mozart and Wagner are possible rivals in this, but with them the process hasn't been going on for so long).

But there is more to Palestrina than his ability to write a masterpiece every time he sat down to compose: his style makes demands of its performers which no other composer quite made. We have come to realize that if a group can sing Palestrina well it can sing any choral music well, for in his music there is no hiding-place. The sonorities are so clear, the logic of the writing so compelling, that one sound out of place is immediately detectable; and a blemish is more serious in music which depends on sheer sound for its impact than in more pictorial or rhetorical compositional styles. With Lassus and Byrd, for example, interpretation through the words alone will go a long way to producing a convincing performance; Palestrina requires his performers to think more carefully about the sound itself. The nearest comparison is with the passage-work in Mozart's piano music, which is equally so clearly and logically conceived that a stray note can acquire a disproportionate influence. Just as a pianist must rehearse scales and arpeggios to play Mozart well, so a vocal ensemble must work on blend and tuning to sing Palestrina well. There is no better or more rewarding way of learning how to sing Renaissance polyphony.

These two discs contain some of the best of our view of Palestrina, from the very first record we made commercially (in 1980), to one of the most recent (entitled ‘Lamenta' and released in 1998). In general we have concentrated on his Mass settings - there are three more in our catalogue as well as another version of Papae Marcelli - not least because they make such effective concert music. Palestrina had an unusual ability to write positive, outward-going, major-key music which, over the length of a Mass-setting, is a great strength: penitential writing tends to be more effective in shorter bursts. Three of the four settings in this collection rely on bright sonorities; the fourth - Sicut lilium - is more subdued and sensuous, as the words of the motet require. The Lamentations, on the other hand, show a completely different side of Palestrina's art. By dividing the text into short movements (and leaving out the Hebrew letters which are traditionally set as part of the whole) he was able to deliver a series of plangent statements worlds away from the mood of Papae Marcelli and Assumpta est Maria.

The Missa Assumpta est Maria, based on his own motet of that name which in turn is based on a short phrase of chant, is a classic example of sonorous Palestrina, its excitement achieved in large part by doubling the sopranos and tenors. The brighter sound this high-scored six-voice (SSATTB) choir produces is then emphasized in the style of the writing, which is more chordal than usual. The parody motet Assumpta est Maria shows the way in its opening bars: the three upper voices are grouped against the three lower ones in easily audible antiphony. This late-Renaissance method is then transferred to the Mass, most obviously in the Gloria and Credo but also in the first Kyrie, where greater elaboration was more customary. The sheer verve of this music has ensured that, along with Papae Marcelli, Assumpta est Maria has remained the most performed of all Palestrina's 107 Mass-settings.

Sicut lilium by contrast is an early work, based on a motet which was published in the composer's First Book of Motets in 1569. By contrast with the trumpet-like writing of Assumpta est Maria, the musical style here is more for string quartet, or viol consort: lucid, the working of the counterpoint at times very elaborate indeed. This can be heard at the beginning of the motet, where the point is treated to two complete expositions, from where it is transferred to the first Kyrie. Eventually all the movements except the Gloria open with imitative counterpoint. But underlying all this finely crafted polyphony is the perfumed atmosphere which the words of the motet (from the Song of Songs) originally inspired in Palestrina, and which, despite the long sentences of the Gloria and Creed, he managed to transfer to every corner of the Mass itself.

The second disc opens with a six-voice (SSATTB) set of Lamentations, originally the third lesson on the Saturday of Holy Week. Palestrina obviously felt drawn to the Book of Lamentations: he left nearly sixty individual verse-settings from it. Standardly each of these would begin with the initial Hebrew letter preserved in the Bible, but in this set they are missing. However the customary opening words are retained, as are the deeply emotive final ones: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn to the Lord your God'. It seems that no matter how many times Palestrina set these words he found something new to say through them.

The Missa Brevis (for four voices SATB), although relatively ‘short' and straightforward in musical style, shows Palestrina's idiom at its most accessible. It was a success from the start, being first published in 1570 and reprinted repeatedly up to 1620, since when there have been countless modern editions. Despite this, no one has been able to say what gave the music its starting-point. The most likely candidate is chant, rather than a polyphonic model as the other Masses in this set have; but if it was chant, the melodies are not applied very consistently. In fact the title ‘Brevis' may indicate that there was no pre-existing material - rare in Palestrina's Masses - this title filling in for the missing name of the original. The music is anyway not that short, being conceived in a fluent idiom which seems to glide effortlessly through the longer texts, until it culminates in the second Agnus. Here Palestrina abandoned any pretence at being straightforward and wrote a canonic movement which is a model of the form. The canon (a tune sung first by one voice and then by another some beats apart) is between the two soprano parts (a new one having been added to the ensemble just for this movement), making it as audible as anyone could wish. As with the best canons it seems as though it can never end.

The Missa Papae Marcelli also culminates in a canonic second Agnus, but here both the build-up and the canon itself are very different. This is the Mass which was said to have ‘saved church music' by proving to the cardinals at the Council of Trent that words set to music could be audible even in polyphony. Dedicated to Pope Marcellus II, who had reigned for three weeks in 1555, it was probably written in 1556 and therefore dates from the years when that argument was raging. However it is hard to believe in this story entirely. Although the style of the music is syllabic at times, especially in the Gloria and Credo, it is not the case that the words are consistently more audible than in other settings of the period, something anyway made harder by using six voices (SATTBB) rather than four. Indeed the canonic second Agnus (now for seven voices SSAATBB) is one of the most complex movements of the High Renaissance, its mathematical density unequalled elsewhere in Palestrina's output. What one can say, however, is that the setting as a whole is an unparalleled masterpiece, of the kind one returns to again and again over the years. The Tallis Scholars gave their first performance of it in March 1977 and their 75th in June 2004. I hope there will be countless more.

Peter Phillips 2004

Renaissance Giants - The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips

Renaissance Giants
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
Gimell CDGIM 207

The High Renaissance is well known for its cultural giants. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and above all Michelangelo epitomize a period when the human spirit seemed to grow and gain in confidence. There is no more visible proof of this than Michelangelo's seventeen-foot-tall statue of David, more than twice the height of any major piece of sculpture before it. And Italy was not the only country which suddenly seemed to be populated by more-than-life-size men of genius, Shakespeare and Cervantes among them. This collection is designed to illustrate the musical side of this astonishing period in European history, from England via Flanders and Spain to Rome.

Music and musicians can bestride their world in one of two ways. They can either write a masterpiece which is in itself colossal; or they can write so many great works that they slowly change the countryside around them. Thomas Tallis did both. By writing music of the highest quality in every style of the period for nearly sixty years he influenced everybody who followed him. And he also wrote Spem in alium, perhaps not his most influential composition - who could follow it? - but unquestionably the largest single work of the period. Conceived for forty independent voice-parts arranged in eight five-part choirs, Spem in alium, like Michelangelo's David, seems to break through what lesser men had come to accept as normal in music and enter a new world. The effect of forty parts coming together in properly argued polyphony is quite staggering. How did Tallis do it, without modern aids like computers or even sufficiently large pieces of manuscript paper on which to line up all the voices? There is much about Spem in alium which is not known - like why he thought of such a thing in the first place - but the greatest imponderable is how any mind could invent so much detail. Nothing comes close to rivalling it.

The Western Wind Mass by John Taverner is big in a quite different way from Spem in alium. Throughout the Renaissance period there was a vogue for taking popular tunes of the day and dressing them up, a technique which jazz musicians were to emulate in later times. Taverner chose the beautiful melody known as ‘Westron Wynde', a love song which encourages the wind and the rain to do their worst so long as the singer and his beloved can be together. In choosing such a profane model for a Mass-setting Taverner was not in fact doing anything very uncommon; what was unusual was quoting the tune thirty-six times. I do not know any set of variations before Purcell's ‘grounds' to go so far; and, like Purcell, Taverner has the imagination to make them all interesting. He is quite deliberate about it: nine statements in each of the four movements, each one taking on new ideas and counter-themes. No one can miss the tune itself, since it is quoted twenty-one times in the top part, where it is always perfectly audible. It also comes ten times in the tenor part and five in the bass, though it is never sung by the altos. Taverner also helps the listener by making each variation self-contained and running them straight into each other without extra material. This makes the music quite sectional, alternating solo and full passages, but with the melody always present. Taverner was sufficiently a giant of his time to start a brief tradition of Western Wind settings: there are examples by his younger contemporaries Christopher Tye and John Sheppard.

If ever there was a giant among Renaissance composers, it was Josquin. It has become something of a modern cliché to compare his standing with that of Beethoven: a composer who could take any form of music and transform it. Part of his great influence came from the fact that he travelled throughout Europe, the first super-star among composers, a fact which was acknowledged at the time not least because he expected to be paid more than anyone else. He was especially present in Rome, from where he undoubtedly shaped the course of Italian polyphony in general, and Palestrina's style in particular. Josquin's Missa Pange lingua is perhaps his best-known work and possibly his last Mass-setting. In general outline it is not dissimilar from Taverner's Western Wind Mass: a set of variations on a well-known tune, but in this case the tune is a chant melody from the liturgy for the feast of Corpus Christi; and Josquin almost never quotes it straight. Indeed it is so hidden in the polyphonic texture that one may think of the whole composition as a fantasy on a plainsong, rather than a set of variations. The clearest statement is at the beginning of the third Agnus Dei, where the melody finally emerges in recognizable form in the soprano part.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was by far and away the most celebrated Italian composer of the High Renaissance and, like Josquin, a legend in his lifetime. He was also, unlike any other Renaissance composer of any nationality, celebrated from his own time to ours without interruption. I wonder if any other composer in the history of music, apart from Wagner, has had so much written about him. And apart from all this he was working in and around the Vatican at the same time as Michelangelo in his later years, whom he must have known. As a result there is no other composer who is so closely identified with the culture of the Italian Renaissance period. His Missa Brevis was probably written for the Sistine Chapel choir to sing, which would mean that its first performances would have taken place surrounded by Michelangelo's newly painted frescoes. Why the piece is called ‘Brevis' is something of a mystery, since the music is not especially short and all the usual movements are present. It may be because it is scored for only four voices, though this was quite commonplace. The final, glorious Agnus Dei increases the number of voices to five by introducing a second soprano part, in canon with the first. Unlike his teacher Tallis, William Byrd didn't write any single gigantic work by which he may be remembered. Indeed he is best remembered for his many small-scale pieces which, despite their size, revolutionized English composition. Like several of the other giants in this collection, Byrd turned his hand to every form of music available to him, transforming them as he went: music for keyboard, lute, viol consort, voices with viol consort, sacred vocal writing for both the Catholic and Protestant churches, and madrigals. To compare him with Shakespeare has some force since their lives overlapped, they both worked in London at the same time, and they both had the same characteristic intelligence of mind which penetrated to the heart of the words they were involved with. Byrd's Mass for four voices is one of the three Masses he wrote in the 1590s and published, without title pages, in defiance of the Protestant ban on Catholic artefacts. This is not gigantic music in any sense, but subtle, intimate writing which in recent times has achieved greater renown than many much weightier musical edifices of the period.

The Spanish sixteenth century had its own great men and women to celebrate, from St Ignatius Loyola and St Teresa of Avila, to El Greco, Morales and Victoria. It will be seen from these names that the accent there in the High Renaissance was on the Catholic Church and spiritual life. Tomás Luis de Victoria was no exception to this. After being ordained priest in Rome in 1575 he spent the years from 1587 until his death employed at the court in Madrid, initially acting as chaplain to the Dowager Empress Maria, for whose funeral he wrote this Requiem in 1603. It comes as no surprise to discover that Victoria only wrote sacred music, and not very much of it by some standards, but what he did write is of such intensity that for many people his larger works, and especially the six-voice Requiem, are without rival amongst High Renaissance masterpieces. The slow, inevitable unfolding of this music, movement by movement, in complete serenity surely has a message for all time.

Peter Phillips 2006

Allegri: Miserere - The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips

Allegri: Miserere, Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli,
Mundy: Vox Patris Caelestis
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
Gimell CDGIM 339

The original release, not the cheap 25th Anniversary version.

Here's a wonderful introduction to Renaissance choral music, with two tried-and-true repertory standards and the Mundy, a gorgeously sensuous example of a lesser-known mid-16th-century work, whose complex polyphonic strands are rendered with compelling involvement by the Tallis Scholars. These performances were among the group's earliest recordings and helped catapult them into the forefront of specialists in this demanding repertoire. The Allegri became a favorite back in the 1970s, a sort of choral equivalent of Albinoni's Adagio, in which repetition serves as the driving force. The Tallis Scholars give it welcome variety through spatial placement in a large church and their colorful singing. Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli is one of that great composer's finest works. Its mastery of polyphony while clarifying the text is said to have convinced the Church to withhold its impending ban on polyphonic church music. The group sounds larger than its 21 members because of the acoustics, the clear diction of the Scholars, and the power of their singing, always transparent and involved. They use female sopranos instead of boys' voices, so there's more heft and color than we often hear from early-music groups. Vivid engineering makes the CD even more attractive.

Dan Davis, Amazon Editorial Review