Music review: The Tallis Scholars
Back in Adelaide for their 13th visit, The Tallis Scholars again showed why they are the gold standard in choral singing.
Much loved and respected, The Tallis Scholars are unarguably one of the great treasures of a-capella singing. More than any other group, they have brought back to life the time honoured choral tradition that spans back to the Renaissance. And it is a remarkable fact that director Peter Phillips has been at their helm since they started in 1973. No other vocal ensemble of the front rank can boast such continuity.
Just knowing that makes them special, but it is the quality of their singing that sets them apart. The Tallis Scholars are a ten-member outfit, and each singer has the clearest, most delectably tuned voice. That was one of the first things one noticed in this program of sacred music from Hildegard von Bingen to Arvo Pärt. Those four sopranos and four males are pin-point in accuracy, which sure helps in Allegri’s Miserere, whose soaring soprano part makes it one of the most perilous assignments in the entire choral repertoire.
Daringly, they took on this piece – and we’ll get to how they fared in a little while.
But it is the spirit of their singing that makes this UK group truly distinctive. A hushed and reverential approach is not for them. They sang out with striking force in Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla’s Deus in audiutorium. The tenors sounded like trumpets, and the full ensemble responded with huge resolve. This seventeenth century composer, who was born in Spain but moved to Mexico during the middle of his career, was clearly no shrinking violet.
Neither is Phillips, it would seem. Rather than moulding this choir’s sound in a controlled manner, he releases their voices in a full, open way.
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In the early days, The Tallis Scholars’ reputation was founded very much on English music of the Renaissance, principally with composers Thomas Tallis (after whom they are named), John Taverner, William Byrd and others of the Tudor period. However, more than 60 records later, they can lay claim to much broader territory, and this concert gave a good indication of how widely they now venture.
Sacred monophony of Hildegard von Bingen, dating back to the twelfth century, threaded its way through this Mexican music and contemporary works by Pärt. It was all themed around the idea of chant: of how this ancient form of singing has given rise to the vast flowering of choral music through the centuries.
Keeping matters pure and simple, just four sopranos were needed for Hildegard’s mystically beautiful songs, and these performances felt believably right in their natural, speech-like flow of line.
Pärt uncannily meets on a similar plane in his music. Unusually for this Estonian composer, he writes to an English text in his piece Triodion (1998), but his style is characteristically familiar: pared back, made of silence as much as sound, and altogether transfixing thanks to the unanimity in which these 10 singers breathed together.
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The feeling of tactus – of the steadiest pulse of time – was almost physically palpable in the same composer’s Magnificat (1989) and Da Pacem Domine (2004), which reach into yet deeper levels of meditation. The latter piece, written in commemoration of the victims of the 2004 Madrid train bombings, directly quotes Gregorian chant, and in its gently hanging phrases felt like the answer to a fractured world.
The Tallis Scholars are not a concert choir to the extent that they simply concern themselves with the music and refrain from performing to their audience in an overt way. So much the better for this music and two six-part motets by Jacob Obrecht and Josquin des Prez. Their singing in these was unconstrained and full toned while fastidiously proportioned: subtle gradients of dynamics gave these lovely polyphonic gems fluid life and vigour.
The only criticism one might have had was that really, we should be hearing these works in an ecclesiastical space. That’s its home, and one imagines where The Tallis Scholars also feel most comfortable. But with a group as versatile as they are, everything can be artfully solved.
In Allegri’s Miserere, all it needed was to split up the singers and locate them in separate spots in the Town Hall. This piece from the 1630s, which the young Mozart was famously able to memorise and write down after hearing it in the Sistine Chapel, is actually intended for two choirs, of five and four voices each, with chant sung by a separate singer.
How wonderful it was, then, to hear this piece coming from three locations around the Town Hall: from the stage, the right-hand side, and the rear. Now it sounded like a cathedral.
Most spectacular, though, were those top C notes that make the Miserere such a nightmare for choirs of even slightly lesser rank to tackle. So exposed is its soprano part that there is no margin for error. For The Tallis Scholars, though, it seemed business as usual. One of the sopranos, situated to the right, sailed through its sky-high notes with the greatest skill, making it all seem easy.
This was the thirteenth time Adelaide has hosted The Tallis Scholars, and it was a thrill hearing them again. They just might be one of the few unadulterated joys left on planet Earth.
The Tallis Scholars performed at Adelaide Town Hall on Thursday, October 9.