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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

Great music looks back with affection on music's past, and forward with confidence to its future.  And Kansas City got a long affectionate look at Western music's rather distant past last Thursday night with the Tallis Scholars, perhaps the best Renaissance vocal polyphony performance ensemble in the world.

All-around music impresario Peter Phillips founded the Tallis Scholars in England in 1973 and has led them in over 1,600 concerts since.  The group has appeared many times in Kansas City, including two performances in the last 18 months alone.   

Thursday night's performance was presented by The Friends of Chamber Music.  It was an evening of music written in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary and music written to be performed in a church with high ceilings.  Performed in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, the 40 foot ceiling lent the necessary reverberation intended by the composers.

Josquin du Prez' Missa de Beate Virgine, written sometime around 1500, is a kind of pastiche.  The five regular choral parts of the traditional Catholic Mass - Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei - weren't written as a unified whole of a single plainsong theme, a motet or a secular song.

Instead, this Mass was written in separate movements whose common thread is a sound that du Prez' listeners would have known from everyday life.  That is, this Mass is a "chant paraphrase," as the program notes put it. It's easy to imagine ordinary Catholics enjoying this music when it was new - complete with their attention diverted at times by restless children of their own. 

Five hundred years later, it still sounds a little disjointed thematically, which makes the Scholars' artistry all the more impressive.

Phillips' fame rests partly on his uncanny ability to match voices to one another; and his matching is peerless.  The Tallis Scholars' seamless tonal wall of sound lent a most touching unity to the sound of the Mass that its actual text does not always support.

When asked about how he goes about auditioning new members for the ensemble, Phillips said, "Basically, the singers let me know when they sing with musicians they admire in other ensembles, and then when the opportunity arises we invite them to sing a concert with us."  It's another way the best of its kind honors the past.  This kind of quasi-pickup performance group was a fact of life for choristers and monastics when du Prez was writing on the Continent.

In England, the Elizabethean Age had a dark side, even a violent side, and nothing brought out the worst in people more efficiently than religion.  There is a distant echo of all this in the program's second half, most of which was dedicated to music written in circumstances of great personal turmoil.

John Nesbett's Magnificat was written in England, probably at Cambridge in the 1470s or 1480s.  Like du Prez' Mass, Nesbett's Magnificat was written to honor the Virgin Mary.  The text is taken from Mary's dialog with Saint Elizabeth in Saint Luke's Gospel.

Thursday night we also heard from Nesbett's countrymen and fellow Catholics Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.  However, their music was written in quite different circumstances, and with a noticeable change in the music's power.

Thomas Tallis was born in about 1505 and died in 1585; William Byrd was 35 years younger.  The two were good friends and business partners, and Tallis stood as godfather to one of Byrd's children.  Perhaps it is true that Byrd was the greater composer.  One can hear the new harmonies of the next 150 years struggling to be born in his music. 

But Tallis was the voice of England, and England's voice was Catholic until then. 

It was illegal for Catholics to practice their faith openly in England from 1538 to 1829, and both Tallis and Byrd worked as court musicians for Anglican monarchs.  But despite a relatively privileged position, in effect they wrote from the catacombs.  This melancholy fact gives their music an emotional power that John Nesbett's music, wonderful as it is, simply does not communicate. 

Tallis' Tunes for Archbishop Parker's Psalter is a good example of this.  It was written to be sung in English for the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, the mother see of the Church in England.  Perhaps one can hear the traditional English Christianity in Tallis' music all the better when English voices sing it.  That Christianity was Catholic, and Matthew Parker was not.  But history is nothing if not messy, and a banquet of irony for everyone.

Neither Tallis nor William Byrd ever abandoned his faith.  But Byrd's music makes it clear that he also loved his country.  His Tribulationes civitatum, first published in 1589, after his death, is taken to be encouragement for England in its birth pains as a modern state.  At least Queen Elizabeth may have thought so: she granted Byrd a lifetime music publishing monopoly! 

At the same time, Byrd's intention in the evening's last piece, his Vigilate, may well have been to protest the legalized religious discrimination Catholics faced in his day - and to remind those in control of England that all men will someday stand at the judgment seat of Christ.

How he got away with this is anyone's guess.  Yet he did, and this rousing final piece made a fitting conclusion to the Tallis Scholars' concert - by turns reverent, joyous, impassioned, and even discursive at times - illustrating once again the great emotional breadth and depth of Renaissance polyphony.

 REVIEW:
The Friends of Chamber Music
The Tallis Scholars
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
416 West 12^th Street, Kansas City, MO
For more information visit www.chambermusic.org

Top photo by Albert Roosenburg