Josquin des Prés Masses – The Tallis Scholars

There’s a moment about four minutes into the Missa Pange Lingua‘s opening Kyrie where the sopranos of The Tallis Scholars simply float above the texture, unsupported, it seems, by anything but air and habit — and you remember why this group changed how we hear Renaissance polyphony in the first place. Before Peter Phillips started fussing over tuning and blend back in the early 1970s, much of this repertoire was sung by British cathedral choirs with wobble, or by continental ensembles favoring a thicker, more monastic sound. Phillips wanted transparency. He got it, and forty years on, that transparency still startles.

Josquin remains the touchstone. Every scholar of the period says so, and for once the scholars are right. He was, by common consent among his contemporaries — Glarean called him “the master of the notes,” which the notes obey rather than the other way around — the most important composer of sacred polyphony before Palestrina, and possibly the most important, full stop, until Bach. The two Masses here show him at opposite ends of his ambition. The Missa Pange Lingua, likely written in his last years at Condé-sur-l’Escaut, takes Aquinas’s great eucharistic hymn tune and paraphrases it through all five movements with a kind of devotional freedom — the chant surfaces, submerges, returns transfigured. It doesn’t feel like mastery. It feels like prayer that happens to be extraordinarily well organized.

The Missa La sol fa re mi is the party trick, except that calling it a party trick undersells it badly. Five solfège syllables, hammered out (Phillips counts upward of two hundred appearances) as a rigid cantus firmus, ought to produce something arid, a compositional crossword puzzle. It doesn’t. There’s a story — probably apocryphal, but good stories about Josquin usually are — that the tune comes from a French phrase, “lascia fare mi,” roughly “leave it to me,” supposedly directed at a patron who kept pestering the composer for a piece and got fobbed off with a joke that turned into a masterpiece. True or not, the music has a wink in it. The Tallis Scholars catch that wink without turning it into a smirk.

Give the group’s sopranos their due — brilliant, focused, occasionally almost too pure for comfort, but never edgy in the way trained cathedral trebles or continental sopranos so often are in this repertoire. Listen to the Sanctus of the La sol fa re mi Mass: the opening is spacious, almost stately, then the “Pleni sunt caeli” picks up energy, and by the “Hosanna” the whole choir is moving with a rhythmic lift that’s genuinely joyful rather than merely brisk. Steane was dead right about that decades ago, and I don’t see much point in trying to improve on his word “vitality.” It’s the correct word. Josquin’s counterpoint dances here in a way that shatters the old myth of Renaissance church music as gray, static, monkish wallpaper.

Do the interpretations still hold up against what’s come along since — the Hilliard Ensemble’s cooler, more austere Josquin, or the Clerks’ Group under Edward Wickham, who dug into the manuscript sources with real scholarly bite? I think they do, though not for identical reasons. The Hilliards give you more chill in the cathedral air; the Clerks give you more edge, more sense of fifteenth-century performing practice reconstructed from first principles. What Phillips gives you — and gave listeners first, remember, back in 1986 when this repertoire was still a minority taste even among early-music enthusiasts — is warmth without sentimentality, precision without pedantry. The blend is famously homogeneous, yes, yet within that blend you can still pick out individual voices breathing, individual vowels shaping themselves slightly differently. It’s disciplined singing that never forgets it’s made of people.

The engineering, done in the resonant acoustic of Merton College Chapel, Oxford, gives the sound a halo without smearing the counterpoint into mush — a real achievement, since Josquin’s imitative lines depend on clarity of entry to make their full effect. You hear each voice enter the fugal texture of the Christe eleison distinctly, then hear it dissolve into the general glow. That’s the whole art of album this repertoire in a nutshell, and not every engineer gets it right.

Forty years is a long time for any ensemble to sustain a mission, let alone one built on such narrow, specialized repertoire. That the Tallis Scholars’ most celebrated disc — the one that, absurdly, took until 2010 to find company as an early-music Gramophone Record of the Year winner — still sounds this alive tells you something. Not every award ages well. This one did. Buy it for the Pange Lingua Mass, stay for the wit of the La sol fa re mi, and marvel, as I still do, that five solfège syllables could yield music this humane.