The Tallis Scholars in Lisbon: Renaissance stasis

My first real exposure to high quality Renaissance music was via Tallis Scholars recordings, back in the 1980s when they were a relatively new group. Remarkably, the founder of the group, Peter Phillips, is still leading them over 50 years after their founding. Based on the performance I saw last week in Belém, there has been remarkably little change in the group's sonic or interpretive stance over that timespan. Depending on your perspective, that is either comforting or disappointing. Count me in the latter group (I know, what a surprise). Over recent decades, new groups performing the core Renaissance repertory have sprung up and have communicated new interpretive and sonic ideas. You would never know this from last week's performance. Phillips' interpretive view is seemingly etched in granite. High quality granite, to be sure, but still granite.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, recordings of Renaissance music were unusual. Phillips started the Tallis Scholars in 1973, when he was an organ student/scholar at Oxford. He selected the group from academic choirs at Oxbridge (hence the "scholars" in the name) and quickly established the performance standard for Renaissance polyphony. Qualities included impeccable tuning, a white, gleaming purity of women's' voices, no vibrato, and interpretations focused on musical clarity, without too many tempo or dynamic changes to distract from the purity of the music. This approach worked very well for composers like Palestrina, Taverner, and Byrd, in which the harmony and clarity of chordal progression is paramount. It was less satisfying for more dynamic, edgy composers like Josquin and Tallis; the Scholar's performances of these works always seemed pretty but uneventful, even affectually flat at times. That said, their excellence and many recordings have dominated the recording field in this repertory, and perhaps convinced listeners that this was the one and only way to perform Renaissance music. It is not. 

By the 1980's new groups like the Hilliard Ensemble and A Sei Voci (both now disbanded) modified the Tallis Scholars "standard" by replacing some soprano/alto women with male countertenors. By now the Tallis Scholars are unusual in their avoidance of countertenors, continuing to use male voices only for tenor and bass parts. The resultant sound in some of these new groups was notably warmer, sometimes with a bit of vibrato allowed to color the sound. These groups' dynamic range was also wider, adding more drama to the music. More recently, the British ensemble I Fagiolini has made recordings bringing added drama and vocal resonance to this literature, singing both core Renaissance repertory like Byrd and Victoria, but also the later, more operatic music of Monteverdi. 

Last week's Tallis Scholars concert in the small theater in Belém seemed utterly isolated from this half century of performance practice evolution. Their sound was very similar to their 1980's recordings; Peter Phillips evidently picks singers to reproduce his aural conception of what this music should sound like. There were 10 singers, 2 per part, with 6 women and 4 men. The program consisted of music of Giovanni Palestrina (1525-1594) and the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). The purity and (relative) simplicity of Palestrina should have suited this group to a tee. While the women had the expected purity and laser focus, the tenors often sounded less blended and focused than in the old days, and the basses were a bit underbalanced. This gave a rather disjointed, hybrid feel to the concert, as if the men and women were performing differently. The longest work, the Missa Brevis, was beautiful, pure, and, yet somewhat characterless. Yes, the Catholic Mass has drama! Christ is entombed, rises, and we are granted everlasting life...all of these can be quite dramatic, but not here. The Arvo Pärt pieces were more interesting, including a Nunc dimittis and the fascinating Which was the son of.., mostly consisting of a roll call of Jesus's ancestors from the Old Testament, yet infused with interesting contrasts both harmonic and metric. It seemed that it took a more overtly dramatic composer to rouse Phillips and his choir to a higher adrenaline level. 

Over the years, the Tallis Scholars have done a great service to us by recording such a huge chunk of the Renaissance repertory (eg all the Josquin masses), but the downside of this has been the fossilization of their style and its near-ubiquitous acceptance as what this music should sound like. Of course, in the absence of witnesses and recordings, we do not really know how the music was sung 5 centuries ago. But do check out recordings of some of the other groups I mentioned above, esp. I Fagiolini, for other opinions, ones that I usually find more interesting.