SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT REVIEW
 

Josquin, Nesbett, Tallis and Byrd: The Tallis Scholars, conductor Peter Phillips, Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, New York City 12.12.2009 (GG)

Josquin: Missa de Beata Virgine
John Nesbett: Magnificat
Thomas Tallis: Tunes for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter
William Byrd: Ye sacred muses, Tribulationes civitatum, Vigilate

 

The Tallis Scholars’ Christmas time visit to New York City, under Miller Theater’s Early Music series, featured sacred music in a sacred space, but nothing specifically seasonal. Headlining the program was the Josquin mass for the Virgin Mary, which made up the first half. This work was apparently notably popular in its era.

With a total of ten voices, including four tenors, the Scholars produced their expected beautiful sound with an excellent balance between richness and transparency. This made for a lovely performance of the mass, with Josquin’s contrapuntal voices always clear. This work, which Philips indicated they will be recording in January, has interesting formal features: it is not completely contrapuntal, the Kyrie is in a roughly ABA form which sounds like a proto-Sonata-Allegro form, and instead of having one plainchant tune upon which the sections are based the units were apparently composed to be performed separately. It offers a quality of variety unlike the usual Renaissance mass. With exquisite, long-breathed phrasing, the voices combined in a fulsome, shining, serene sound. The Credo and Benedictus are especially inventive, the latter developed through a series of canonical repetitions in the inner voices, and the latter loud, bright and tremendously inventive. The density of the music at its most contrapuntal and the use of melisma has the interesting effect in this music of obliterating the words of the mass and thus their literal meaning, but the music itself is both engaging – the ear jumps eagerly to each set of voices as they enter then re-enter, then follows where they go – and entirely transporting. It was a spellbinding and atemporal performance.

 

The second half was all polyphony from England, music that was blunter and more agitated. John Nesbett’s Magnificat was a curiosity, one of only two surviving works by this essentially unknown composer. Compared with the poise and polish of Josquin, this music explodes at the listener, eagerly and ingratiatingly. Nesbett alternates monophonic plainchant of phrases with a following polyphonic development of the same, and also structures low and high voices antiphonally. This seems very graceful, whether that is inherent in the music or a product of the group’s skills, and the performance emphasized the bursting, joyous energy in the piece. If an ensemble with such polish can be described as singing with appropriate naiveté, it would be the Tallis Scholars singing Nesbett. The rendition of the tunes from their namesake was quick and relaxed, and Philips led the work as published in the Psalter itself, with no variations of psalms. This is a pithy, lovely piece, with an attractive plainness and modesty.

The concluding works from Byrd where something altogether different - powerful and almost aggressively intense. The lament on the death of Tallis was mournful and yet performed with an inevitable, supple joy in the very act of making music. Byrd’s own composition is an importantly ironic rebuke to the own last line of his text: “Tallis is dead, and Music dies.” Music endures, and praises Tallis. His self-conscious and important decision to use English Catholic text in the Tribulationes leads to music that is extremely dynamic. It is a cry against the Reformation, full of anguish, and he presses the line “fear and confusion have fallen upon us” almost without mercy, doing everything he can to use music to make us see what he sees and feel what he feels. This urgency was completely clear in the performance, as it was in the concluding Vigilate, a warning from the gospel of Mark, where the music conveys a determined intensity, admonishing the listener to be vigilant for the retribution Byrd seems to urge be done on the behalf of himself and his fellows. That such dark and aggressive thoughts are clothed in the intrinsic finery of massed, pure, contrapuntal voices is a demonstration of Byrd’s skills and the possibilities of music itself.

The sell-out crowd, doubtless a mix of believers, agnostics and atheists, responded with sustained, substantial applause. In response and gratitude, the Scholars offered Gombert’s Regina coeli for ten voices, which Philips explained as being apt for the number of forces and the internal composition of four tenors. It was as fine and beautiful as all the other music.

George Grella