Tallis Scholars/Phillips - Taverner, Cornysh, Browne, Tallis, and Sheppard, 2 October 2018

Cadogan Hall

Taverner: Magnificat a 6

Cornysh: Ave Maria

Browne: Stabat Mater

Tallis: Te Deum ‘for meanes’

Cornysh: Gaude virgo mater Christi

Sheppard: Jesus salvator seculi; Gaude virgo Christiphera

The Tallis Scholars

Peter Phillips (director)

In their typical non-emphatic way, the Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips presented here a selection of English sacred music from the Eton Choirbook to Tallis. There was little to ruffle anyone’s feathers here, little in the way of overt ‘interpretation’ – certainly in a modern sense – but ample opportunity to appreciate the mastery on offer in this music, its remoteness from many of our present concerns, and some fine singing.

The evening’s full complement of fourteen singers opened with John Taverner’s six-part Magnificat, ably, convincingly reconstructed from the parts that remain. Plainsong roots were evident – that is, after all, how it opens – as was the great musical flowering, both in work and performance, from that most fertile of soil. Melismatic duetting sopranos and tenors on ‘eius’, the whole choir likewise on ‘suo’: detail was attended to without exaggeration. The greater unfolding was, unsurprisingly, the thing, however. ‘Sound’ did not especially vary; textural variety spoke for itself, Taverner’s ornate doxology culminating in a radiant ‘Amen’.

William Cornysh’s Ave Maria – not the familiar text – perhaps sounds more ‘austere’ to our modern ears, closer to its mediæval past, not least in terms of harmonic relationships. Such would hardly be surprising, given its earlier date of composition. Yet it speaks – and here, in performance, spoke – just as clearly, if differently. Just as much ‘happens’, so long as one listens. John Brown’s Stabat Mater sounded, rightly or wrongly, somewhere in between: as much, I think, a matter of programming as of material. It flowed beautifully, sadness lying in the words rather than in any Romantic, ‘emotional’ sense. Antiphonal passages – such as that between soprano and bass parts, ‘Quis non potest contristari…’ – caught the ear and, more important, returned us to experience and contemplation of the celebrated poem. Nevertheless, the cries of ‘Crucifige, crucifige’, if hardly Bachian, seemed to echo through the ages with the accumulated weight of crucified tradition.

Tallis’s Te Deum ‘for meanes’, which opened the second half, immediately sounded very much of ‘our’ Anglican tradition, even thought that requires more than a little backdating. Its English text is one thing, of course, but its directness, its interplay between ‘dec’ and ‘can’ (the two sides of the choir’), its harmony, and much else had it sound more modern than perhaps it is. One drew parallels, of course, not least points of detail – false relations, for instance – with what had gone before, but it was a different church, a different Church too, brought forth in one’s visual as well as aural imagination. Might it have been performed with a little more drama? Yes. Should it have been? Perhaps. Again, however, there was much to glean from the gentle, informed respect with which these voices and their director brought it to life.

Cornysh’s Gaude virgo mater Christi seemed to offer merely in its notes something a little more – this is highly relative – of a lament. Our conceptions of what ‘fits’ a text, however, are not necessarily those of a fifteenth-century composer. It would be mightily strange if they were. The music once again drew us in to the text, another hymn of praise to the Virgin. Two works by John Sheppard concluded the concert. The Compline alternation of chant and polyphony founded upon it in Sheppard’s Jesu salvator saeculi yielded subtle secrets, not least in the surprising – so long as one listened! – final ‘Amen’. The Marian votive antiphon, Gaude virgo Cristiphera – according to James M. Potter’s helpful booklet note, the only example we have from Sheppard – took longer, considerably longer over its words, offering a radiant sense of culmination. This, one felt, was a world of wonders almost yet not quite vanished. The more we listened, the more we shared in it: quite right too.

The encore, Purcell’s Hear my Prayer, still sounds very much ‘with us’: too much so, some might argue, accusing us of sentimentalising. So be it; those grinding dissonances implored as few harmonies can. The English Orpheus will always be with us; so too will his predecessors – as, indeed, will his successors. Why choose?

For St George's Day: 'migrant' and other suspect English music

I am, I hope, one of the least nationalistic people alive, but I could not help thinking, when seeing a Gramophone list of ‘Top 10 English Composers’ for St George’s Day, that we could do a great deal better than that. John Tavener (rather than John Taverner)? Delius, seriously? The ludicrously overrated Britten (who might make it in for The Turn of the Screw, but for little else)? Not that I expect members of the Campaign for Real Barnacles to agree, but I thought I should offer an alternative top ten, celebrating not only, in ‘nativist’ style, those born here, but those who lived and worked here.

John Taverner: composer of music of such complexity as to make most post-Schoenbergian music seem like ‘easy listening’. He saw the light, thank goodness; he seems to have become a proper Englishman and gave up on music.

 

 

William Byrd: a traitor in hock to un-English, Italianate Popery who composed for other such traitors (the politically correct might call them ‘recusants’ or even 'victims of state-sponsored religious persecution', the Muslims of their day).

 

 

Henry Purcell: the English Orpheus, whose music, alas, drew far too heavily upon Frenchified nonsense.

 

 

George Frideric Handel: a German ‘migrant’ in the service of German ‘migrant’ monarchs.

 

 

Franz Joseph Haydn: a shady ‘Croat’ who shamelessly took away ‘British jobs for British people’, even ‘sending home’ the money he purloined; Gordon Brown would have had none of that.

 

 

 

Felix Mendelssohn: Another temporary ‘migrant’, not only German, but shock horror, Jewish too. Still, he visited Birmingham.

 

 

Edward Elgar: composer of German music, masquerading as an Englishman.

 

 

Alexander Goehr: son of a German ‘migrant’ who, still worse, was a pupil of Schoenberg and had the temerity to introduced Monteverdi’s foreign 1610 Vespers to this scepter’d isle.

 

 

Harrison Birtwistle: composer of such cacophony that a group of common-sense Englishmen assumed their patriotic duty to ‘heckle’ performances of music closer to Stravinsky than to H Balfour Gardiner. From ‘The North’.

 

 

Rebecca Saunders: a woman, who moved to Germany. I can’t imagine why.
 

 

And I’ve still had to omit John Dowland and many others. Oh well: next year.

 

Tallis Scholars - The Song of Mary, 21 December 2010

St John's, Smith Square

Taverner – Dum transisset Sabbatum
Taverner – Magnificat à 4
John Plummer – Anna mater matris
Taverner – Magnificat à 6
Monteverdi – Missa in illo tempore

Tallis Scholars
Peter Phillips (director)


St John’s, Smith Square is currently celebrating its twenty-fifth annual Christmas festival. Looking at the other names involved, there is very much an ‘Early Music’ emphasis, but this offering from the Tallis Scholars was more restrained, in temper and in content, with respect to its seasonal contribution than one suspects some others may have been. Indeed, two Magnificats notwithstanding, it was more a Marian than an Advent or Christmas survey.

John Taverner’s music occupied most of the first half. First came the Easter responsory, Dum transisset Sabbatum, telling of the three Marys going to the tomb intending to anoint the body of Christ, culminating in the first Alleluia since the onset of Lent. Though the Tallis Scholars tend not to occupy themselves with exaggerated wordpainting, there was a (relatively) sensual emphasis upon ‘aromata’, the aromatic oils the women would use. Plainsong sounded evocative in the best sense: restrained, permitting the words to speak, preparing the way for polyphony. All twelve voices had been employed for the responsory; four left the stage for Taverner’s four-part Magnificat, sung two to a part. The chant was nicely flexible, contrasting with what one might think of as audible, though not rigid, bar lines for the flowering of polyphony. Wordpainting could again be heard without exaggeration upon ‘dispersit’, the proud duly scattered. Save for an uncharacteristically weak bass entry upon ‘Esurientes’, this was again a fine performance, which, like that of the six-part setting, furnished a sense of the canticle as a whole.

In the latter, the sopranos who had now joined the throng were able to soar. There was naturally something of a more ‘choral’ sound to the ensemble with the greater numbers, but Taverner’s polyphonic lines remained crystal clear. I much appreciated well-turned melismata upon ‘nostros’ and ‘saecula,’ and a radiant culiminating doxology. All that was missing was Taverner’s other setting, in five parts, but the Tallis Scholars are due to record all three. In between the Magnificat settings, we heard John Plummer’s fifteenth-century supplication to Anna, the mother of the Virgin. Five solo voices, without Peter Phillips as conductor, created a lighter texture, through which one could hear very well what Alexandra Coghlan in her programme note referred to as ‘relentless F major’. In that sense, the work sounded relatively modern, yet the musicians’ delivery of their lines and occasional hints of a drone impressed upon us a more mediæval quality.

The second half brought Monteverdi’s parody mass on a motet by Gombert, the Missa in illo tempore, four hundred years old this year. Where the contemporary Vespers are full of avant-gardist seconda prattica, the a cappella mass displays the composer’s command of the old-style prima prattica. Phillips’s shaping of the Kyrie impressed: the opening ‘Kyrie eleison’ leisurely bit not staid, evincing the delight in sacred music as music that has always been a hallmark of his approach. Liturgical reconstructions and so forth are the province of others. The responding ‘Christe eleison’ and finally the second ‘Kyrie’ statement evinced a cumulative gathering of pace, the latter quite glorious. I cannot claim that I could discern every word of the Gloria, but the wash of sound was beautiful in its own right, and the calls of ‘Gloria’ could certainly be heard; the intonation of a new, more sombre mood upon ‘qui tollis peccata mundi’ was unmistakeable, within again a fine sense of the ‘movement’ as a whole. The Credo largely followed suit, an especial highlight being the properly luminous – obliquely seasonal? – ‘Lumen de Lumine’, whilst the Mystery of the Incarnation itself was movingly expressed in the still centre: ‘et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto, ex Maria Virgine, et homo factus est.’ The final section, from ‘Et in Spiritum Sanctum,’ provided a more overtly Venetian-sounding climax. Hints of this could be heard in the melodic aspects of the Sanctus and Benedictus, though more than equally apparent was the ghost of Palestrina. In the unhurried unfolding of the Agnus Dei, relatively austere and very much of the prima prattica, one was reminded once again – though how could one forget? – that musical beauty requires no instruments other than the voice. As an encore to this fiftieth appearance of the Tallis Scholars at St John’s, we heard a carol, Hieronymus Praetorius’s Joseph lieber, Joseph mein.