Renaissance men: Meeting the Tallis Scholars

Published on Thursday 9 February 2012 00:00

In 2013 the Tallis Scholars celebrate 40 years of thrilling the world with their a capella recreations of Renaissance songs. By Kenneth Walton

The Tallis Scholars have been called “the rock stars of Renaissance vocal music” by no less a publication than the New York Times. That might seem an extravagant claim for the a cappella ensemble, whose rarefied roots lie in the college chapels of Oxford and Cambridge, and whose sanctified gigs are almost exclusively limited to highly scented performances of motets, madrigals and anthems from the Early to High Renaissance performed in ecclesiastical venues. Yet this is a group set next year to celebrate 40 years in the business. That puts them on a par with such soon-to-be-40-year-old rockers as AC/DC. They might even have shared that special birthday with the Bay City Rollers, had Edinburgh’s tartan pop sensations lasted the pace. But the truth is, the Tallis Scholars’ douce “fa-la-las” have way outlived the Rollers’ “shang-a-langs”.

Also, what you won’t find in the Tallis’ line-up are the same faces that launched the group back in 1973, except their founder and director Peter Phillips. He was an undergraduate organ scholar at Oxford University when the idea struck him to form a choir specialising in music that very few others were performing at the time.

Four decades on, Phillips has seen his singers regenerate constantly like a chorus of time lords from Doctor Who – past members include such current household names as Mark Padmore and James Gilchrist – but his own simply stated mission “to sing Renaissance music as widely as possible and as much as possible” has been kept alive by his dedication to a task that has been as much a lifelong business as a personal crusade.

“When we started it was almost impossible to get reliable editions of music by composers we take for granted nowadays,” he says. “They just weren’t available, so we often found ourselves either photocopying parts illegally on old stencil machines, or actually writing out the parts from original manuscripts ourselves.

“It was a difficult time for us to expand and develop our repertoire, which boiled down mainly to Anglican church music by Tallis and Byrd. That was fine in Britain, but when it came to touring in Italy they wanted more mainstream European composers such as Lassus, Josquin and Palestrina, so gradually we were able to expand our library.”

The Tallis Scholars were right in there at the flowering of research into the treasure trove of Renaissance polyphony that had been lying dormant in ecclesiastical libraries for centuries, the rediscovery of which was gradually unearthing an extensive body of music that is now familiar to our ears.

In the two concerts they are giving this weekend in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, one particularly familiar work takes central position. It is the Miserere by Gregorio Allegri, notable for its top C and a style of late Renaissance composition that belies its chronological conception within the period normally associated with the early Baroque.

Written for the Sistine Chapel – where Allegri was a member of the Pope’s choir – its seamless polyphony, woven around a central plainsong, will be right at home in the swirling acoustics of Kelvingrove’s marble-clad central hall – itself a perfect natural amplification for the Phillips’ 20-strong ensemble.

Like so many of the works in the Tallis Scholars’ repertoire, it’s virtually impossible to say for certain how close their performance will come to perfectly recreating the original sound of Allegri’s music. Part of the puzzle lies in the Vatican’s original attempts to maintain absolute exclusivity over its in-house composers and the works they produced for the Papal chapel.

It was Mozart who first flouted the law and risked excommunication by listening to a performance of the Miserere during a visit to the Sistine Chapel in 1770 (aged 14), memorising it, then creating a pirate copy (since lost) by writing it down note for note. The story goes that he returned to a second performance with his draft version concealed under his hat, just to check that his musical dictation was accurate.

“It’s definitely a true story,” says Phillips. “The evidence is in a letter that Mozart’s father sent to his mother.” The next chapter in the tale has the eminent traveller and music historian Dr Charles Burney taking possession of Mozart’s manuscript and having it published on his return to England.

“The interesting thing about Mozart’s version is the lack of the top C,” Phillips adds. “The likelihood is that the performers of the time would have sung embellishments that are not in the original Allegri version, so successive performances would have been improvised differently according to Sistine Chapel conventions. When Mendelssohn heard it in the 19th century, and transcribed it himself, he apparently heard the top C.”

The Tallis Scholars have performed this work well over 300 times. They recorded it originally (on their own Gimmel label) in 1980. But it was only ten years ago, during the production of a second recording of the work, and after a period of developing their own improvised solutions to its live performance, that an error in the plainsong, as sung by the top soprano line, became clear.

“It is meant to parody the beautiful Tonus Peregrinus, so we restored it accurately to the chant verses, and it now flows beautifully into the polyphonic sections,” Phillips explains.

This weekend’s performances will feature the original dual combination of choirs – one of five voices, the other of four solo voices. It will also feature music by that other more famous Papal composer, Palestrina, in Friday’s concert, while Saturday’s programme turns the accompanying spotlight on Scotland, and a series of sacred settings by Robert Carver, the 16th-century Scots composer who spent much of his life at Scone Abbey in Perth, and as a member of the Chapel Royal of Scotland.

After Glasgow, the Scholars head across the Atlantic for a mammoth spring tour of the USA. Their reputation is global; their fan base is universal; their pioneering spirit lives up to that of the man they take their name from, the “unreformed Roman Catholic” of the Reformation, Thomas Tallis. Rock on Tommy.

• The Tallis Scholars perform at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum tomorrow and 11 February

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