By Montague Gammon III
Prime Virginia Arts Festival favorites, the British a cappella early music vocal group called The Tallis Scholars, returns to Hampton Roads for a 500th birth-year celebration — at Norfolk’s Christ and St. Lukes Episcopal Church — of the man who just might be the most influential composer of all time. They will leaven their concert with a look at that composer’s more forward looking contemporary, who was the most published composer of their shared time.
That’s the Late Renaissance era, and the two composers are Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594), who spent his career in Rome, and Orlande de Lassus (1532-1594), whose recorded name varies–Orlandus de, Orlando di Lasso, Roland de Lassus, etc.–according to the location of his successive employments.
None other than Felix Mendelssohn put Palestrina in heady company: “I always get upset when some praise only Beethoven, others only Palestrina and still others only Mozart or Bach. All four of them, I say, or none at all.”
“This is great music by any standards…I think [people unfamiliar with such compositions] will get a great thrill out of his kind of singing. Unaccompanied singing is a very special experience,” said Peter Phillips, founder and conductor of the group, who devoted over three-quarters of an hour to a transatlantic phone chat,
It’s a must-hear evening for anyone with an ear for the unequalled beauty of the human voice.
Both composers began their musical careers as acclaimed boy sopranos. One story that Britannica online accepts as fact, though not all sources give it full credence, is that pre-pubescent Lassus was kidnapped for his beautiful voice three times by churches whose choirs saw themselves as rivals to his home church choir.
To the obvious question about boy sopranos of those bygone times, the answer is “No.” Both were married, both had offspring.
Phillips was a 19-year-old Oxford University Organ Scholar when he founded the Tallis Scholars 51 years ago with some of his schoolmates as singers.
(The above video was made in celebration of Tallis Scholars’ 50th anniversary)
They take their name from Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) one of the greatest English composers of that era. Phillips mentioned that all the original choristers had the “job description” at Oxford of “Choral Scholars,” hence Tallis Scholars became the name of their 10 singers plus conductor touring group. (“I slightly regret it now, it sounds like we sit in libraries looking at manuscripts, which we don’t.”)
“I wanted to sing this music.” Phillips said, referring to works originally written for use in church services. “There were very few groups doing this as concert music. There were liturgical choirs singing it in services, but I wasn’t interested in doing that. I wanted to do concerts of it, as great music very well performed…I didn’t want a priest interrupting all the time.”
So there will be no interruption of the Palestrina’s five part Mass titled “Missa Ut re mi fa sol la,” which forms the first part of the concert, roughly half-an-hour of the purest voices we will ever hear.
If “re me fa sol la” sounds rather like a song from Sound of Music, well, “ut” is the older form of “do” (as in “deer, a female deer”), and those are “the six notes that he uses to bind the whole thing together,” Phillips said.
After the intermission, the Scholars return for five shorter pieces; three by Palestrina and two, in something like a compare and contrast structure, by Lassus.
“I’ve put them together so that there’s a real contrast between Palestrina and Lassus. So in the case of the third piece in the second half, it’s a complaint, a lament almost, and then the [next] piece, by Lassus, is a lament also, in a very different style. People are afraid of God’s wrath. And these two composers approach this topic rather differently.”
Those works are Palestrina’s Tribulationes civitatum – roughly “the tribulations which the cities have suffered” and Lassus’s Timor et tremor – “Fear and terror,” a compilation of texts with a title from Psalm 55, v. 5.
“Palestrina was the [most] famous composer of this whole period [Renaissance]. His reputation and influence was the greatest of all in this period and then his reputation and influence carried on right to the present day. That’s unique…We all had to study Palestrina; I had to study the style of Palestrina when I was learning about music as a boy…no one is more influential than that,” noted Phillips.
There is no sound on earth like that of early vocal music, unaccompanied by instruments, soaring through the clerical acoustics of a place like Christ and St. Luke’s. Since, Phillips said, the written records available of original performances do not suggest the same musical excellence that we hear today, it is likely that 21st Century audiences are hearing something far closer to what the composers heard in their heads than did their own contemporary auditors.
Philips rejected this writer’s suggestion that 16th Century audiences imagined what they were hearing as the voices of angels, but “angelic” still seems an appropriate adjective for the sound of the Tallis Scholars.
“Our main achievement,” Philips said, is “that we’ve put forward to the public very great music that they didn’t know that they wanted to hear.”
Endgame: Palestrina was buried under the floor of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Subsequent construction has made his grave, so far, un-locatable. Lassus was buried in a cemetery in Munich, the city where he had worked for decades for the Duke of Bavaria. In 1789 all the cemetery’s gravestones were removed, and in the early 19th Century it was paved over as a central square. After World War 2 an underground parking garage was constructed beneath the square.
WANT TO GO?
“Palestrina & Lassus”
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips conducting
Presented by Virginia Arts Festival
7:30 p.m., Tues. April 29
Christ and St. Lukes, Olney Road at Stockley Gardens, Norfolk
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da: Missa Ut re mi fa sol la
Palestrina: Laudate pueri dominum
Lassus, Orlande de: Media vita
Palestrina: Tribulationes civitatum
Lassus: Timor et tremor
Palestrina: Tu es Petrus
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