BBC Music Magazine, July 1997

The Chapelle du Roi is a choir of just ten young singers, and these intimate performances approximate the sound that Tallis might have heard during the early years of his career, though with female sopranos replacing boy trebles. These are fresh, unaffected accounts, using the predominately slow tempi that seem to have been prevalent in sacred music for this period. Despite one of two rough edges in the more exposed passages for single voices, the standard of singing is exceptionally high. What’s more, the project has been diligently planned and researched, with several of the pieces newly edited for performance, and excellent notes by Nicholas Sandon. The Chapelle du Roi will be an unfamiliar name to many people, but the quality of this disc will surely put these talented performers on the musical map.

Kate Bolton

Goldberg, February 2000

Each of the first three discs of this set of the complete works of Thomas Tallis offered a Mass, filled out with votive antiphons and motets. The pieces on this disc are hymns and responsories for the Divine Office, mostly composed during the last years of Henry VIII. An early Magnificat is also heard here (the finer setting of his Elizabethan years was recorded on the second disc, along with some English settings for Anglican worship). Another disc of Office pieces will appear next.

It is significant that Tallis wrote several polyphonic works for Compline. Some of the greatest Catholic works of the Tudor period were votive antiphons, which were sung after Compline. Since they were additions to the liturgical hours, they were the first to be eliminated by the reformers. By composing these settings for Compline, Tallis made up for the loss of the splendid votive antiphons. Other pieces composed for the Office belong to major feast days when the king took part in the liturgy of the Chapel Royal.

Much of the music is sung from new editions, and the singing is of great distinction. All of these works have been recorded, some of them only once before, but the systematic organisation of this complete set is an advantage in understanding and appreciating their place and purpose.

Jerome F. Weber

Fanfare

The launch of a complete recorded Tallis on top of one if not more complete recorded Byrds is a major advance over the admirable previous efforts to document such composers as Fayrfax and Ludford, whose total surviving output would fit on a few CDs. These two composers, rather, are major undertakings. A few years ago (Fanfare 14:2) we saw considerable attention to Thomas Tallis (ca.1510-85), a composer who uniquely survived from Catholic times to the Elizabethan era.

Music Teachers

These are the first four instalments in a projected series of nine discs, which will bring together all of the surviving music of one of England’s most important sixteenth-century composers. Later volumes will introduce the rather smaller corpus of secular and instrumental items by Tallis, but so far what we have is his church music from the 1520s up to about 1560 (he was to live on until 1585). Although secure dates cannot be given for every work, the series is progressing chronologically as far as can reasonably be established. This is indeed a major strength of this exciting venture: Tallis was to weather all of the religious upheavals and consequent changes of faith that marked the century, and his musical responses are, and will continue to be, documented here in a most absorbing manner. The recordings come with excellent supporting academic credentials in the form of substantial liner notes by Nick Sandon, which taken collectively probably represent some of the most detailed and valuable information available anywhere on any of the less familiar music. And there is some unfamiliar material here, even for hardened devotees of Renaissance choral music. Still to come in the series are some of the composer’s most famous works, one-off extravaganzas such as the 40-part Spem in alium, the two sets of Lamentations, and some of the shorter Latin-texted works such as O nata lux and Salvator mundi (first setting) which were to be published in Tallis’ joint collaboration with his pupil Byrd, the Cantiones... sacrae of 1575.

On the basis of these first four volumes, one may establish some broad common denominators. Voices, ranging in number between 10 for [1] and 15 for [3], sound fresh and vibrant (it is healthy and encouraging to see names listed in the first booklet which are not familiar from regular appearance with other specialist ‘early music’ vocal groups). Latin works are sung according to the current consensus on pronunciation employed in sixteenth-century England; surprisingly, that used for the English-texted items in [2] is modern. Alistair Dixon’s brief introductions to the booklets refer to aspects of performance practice such as these, along with the important matters of pitch and liturgical context. Although no rationale on pitch proves forthcoming, one is grateful for what appear (perhaps pragmatically?) to be eminently sensible decisions, avoiding the stratospherically-high ranges favoured for this repertory in some quarters (which may sound initially exciting, but tend ultimately to prove wearisome). Dixon has a canny knack of finding just the right tempo for nearly every piece on these discs, striking the delicate balance between a feeling of relaxed space and forward momentum, no easy achievement for a composer much of whose music lacks the rhythmic energy of Byrd. The sound favoured is generally warmer, less hard-edged than typifies recordings by The Tallis Scholars: how much this is down to locations and microphone-placement it is difficult to say. The first two volumes were made in St. Augustine’s Church Kilburn, after which the group moved to another well-tried and much-used venue, St. Jude’s Hampstead. Its spacious and still more resonant (though clear) acoustic well suits the rich and expansive textures that are a hallmark of Tallis’ music during the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s, the seven-voice Mass and Suscipe quaeso [3]. The soundscape for [3] and [4] is noticeably brighter, more forward, more ‘digital’ than the earlier instalments, and I’m not convinced that it is an improvement, even if the lower recording level projected in the St. Augustine sessions brings with it some rather noisy atmospherics.

In the four and a half hours of music contained on these discs there is an enormous amount to treasure. There are no weaknesses in any voice part (although on occasion the clarity of vowels in the soprano register seems marginally compromised), and tuning and balance is almost uniformly exemplary. Each of these discs except [4] has as its main item a setting of the Ordinary of the Mass, flanked by shorter items. Kyries were not normally set to polyphony at this time in England, and so Dixon has incorporated troped chant settings. Chant fulfils an important friction both in Tallis’ music, and in the selection on these discs. It appears substantially on [3] as an apt foil to the dense polyphony, allowing the ear time to refresh or cleanse itself.

Addressing the individual discs, [1] is a particularly auspicious start to the cycle. Although devoted to early and potentially less-convincing music, its strengths here are most persuasively argued, as in the opening track Ave Dei patris filia (the only black mark is the excision of the latter part of the text and translation in the booklet). Ave rosa is less interesting; the gem here, exquisitely sung and most expressively shaped, is also one of the smaller-scaled pieces, the four-voice Alleluia, strongly recalling the melismatic, long-limbed style of the composer’s predecessor, John Taverner. Elsewhere, a sure sense of overall pacing underlines the performance of Salve intemerata, though arguably the Mass movements based on it are more successful: lasting five or six minutes each, they are more easily digested than the massive and sprawling sixteen-minute antiphon from which they are derived.

Music in Volume 2 reflects the composer’s provision in the 1540s of items for the reformed church. This is generally less interesting stuff than that on the first disc, but is no less well performed. The best-known work is the simple anthem If ye love me, which crystallizes and marries perfectly the chief characteristics of the Anglican style, one purely chordal, the other clearly and succinctly imitative. In short doses, and in anthologies of Tallis’ music where it can provide an effective foil to his more complex polyphony, this is all very well. Here it is the basis for a whole Mass setting which rarely rises above the routine except for a rather beautiful Agnus Dei. It is, of course, instructive to attune the ear to this style, and Nick Sandon is quite right to single out the chordal shift at the words ‘To give light to them that sit in darkness’ in the Benedictus, which can only make its ‘magical’ effect against a sustained, relatively sober and one-dimensional backdrop. More immediately arresting is the Magnificat which opens the disc, notwithstanding some slightly strange musical corners, and it receives an exhilarating reading. But best of all, and by a considerable margin, is the antiphon Sancte Deus. This marvellous work, for lower voices only, adopts a relaxed tempo and inspires a superb performance.

[3] moves into the following decade, which saw the brief return to the Latin rite for the reign of Mary Tudor. For this Tallis composed some of his most sumptuous music, including the Mass which forms the backbone of this disc. It is not without its problems, surviving only in incomplete form (the Credo so seriously as to prevent inclusion here), and even with sensitive editorial completion elsewhere (such as in this recording), it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tallis could on other occasions be much more telling with a seven-voice texture. While much of the Mass pleases as a rather ‘garrulous’ wash (to appropriate an adjective that has been used of Loquebantur [4]), Suscipe quaeso shows magisterial command of those forces, with breath-taking contrasts in sonority and texture (small wonder that he chose it as a contribution to the 1575 print). Sadly, Chapelle du Roi’s performance is about the only major disappointment here: perhaps a shade too fast, it emerges as prosaic, while the sopranos are not always unanimous in pitch, the basses are uncharacteristically ‘wobbly’, and tuning generally is less than perfect. Better performances are also available of another Tallis masterpiece and the most substantial item here, the six-voice Gaude gloriosa. If more successful than Suscipe, this suffers from a shift in recording perspective: it gives the impression of closer microphones than for the rest, while solo contributions sound somewhat forced, the final ‘Amen’ unpleasantly strident.

Alone amongst these issues, [4] lacks a substantial item in the form of a Mass Ordinary, but it is a well-planned sequence, and includes several very fine pieces. The exquisite Videte miraculum adopts just the right speed and is beautifully sung. All the items here involve alternation of plainchant with polyphony, but any sense of the formulaic or predictable is countered by pitch contrasts, some involving sopranos, others with altos as the top line. Within the simple hymn style there is also surprising metrical variety, Dixon determining the triple rhythms most persuasively. Loquebantur, which can be made to work over an unusually wide range of tempi, is here quite fast, rejecting the high pitch at which it is often sung in favour of one where altos claim and contest the top two parts.

Overall, these are impressive achievements and one may confidently look forward to future instalments, but I am left with the uncomfortable question as to who will or should buy them. From the above it may be inferred that there are two or three wonderful things on each record thus far, but that each also has music which is not quite top-drawer Tallis. I would be hard pressed to suggest any one as a first introduction to the composer. For that one might perhaps turn to The Sixteen, conducted by Harry Christophers, on Chandos (CHAN 0513). However, anyone seriously interested in sixteenth-century English church music will certainly be tempted, just as devotees of Byrd’s keyboard music must consider the recent award-winning Hyperion complete cycle played by Davitt Moroney, seven discs recorded over a six-year period but only then released as a boxed set. A single disc sampler is promised and one wonders whether eventually the same might happen with Signum’s Tallis project. The comparison prompts other fascinating questions of marketing strategies. Hyperion is widely respected for its shrewd business acumen as for its enlightened artistic decision-taking. Did withholding the fruits of those earlier Byrd sessions and refraining from issuing it piecemeal ultimately win the project more kudos and sales? Might Signum better have proceeded along similar lines? Whatever the answers to such crystal ball gazing, one must applaud both the recording company and the performers whose artistic integrity at least is never in doubt.

Click here to read a comparison with the Winchester Cathedral's recording of similar repertoire

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