Renaissance Radio. Sacred Music from the Renaissance Era for Celestial and Secular Radio
The Tallis Scholars/Peter Phillips
rec. Merton College Chapel, Oxford; *Salle Church, Norfolk; ** Temple Church, London; ***Church of St. John, Hackney, London. Published 1986-2013. DDD
Texts and English translations of Latin texts included
Full track-listing at the end of this review
GIMELL CDGIM 212 [75:00 + 76:79]
Forty years. That’s a long time to keep any ensemble coherent, let alone one that has spent four decades reshaping how we hear Renaissance polyphony — pulling it out of the academic shadows and into something that actually breathes.
The anniversary year brought concerts worldwide, culminating in a birthday event at St. Paul‘s Cathedral where Tallis’s Spem in alium shared the program with Byrd and, reportedly, new commissions from Eric Whitacre. Whether recordings of those concerts will materialize remains to be seen. What Gimell has done in the meantime is cleverer — forty-seven short tracks drawn mostly from the back catalogue, a kind of curated anthology that works both as a sampler and as something more genuinely pleasurable than that word implies.
The concept has an obvious practical logic: radio programmers who need a three-minute Renaissance snippet now have their resource. Fine. But dismiss it as a broadcaster’s convenience kit and you miss the point. Dip into this set late on a winter evening, and you will find yourself pulled through track after track — the music accumulates, the ear gets greedy.
Not everything here reaches back to the ensemble’s earliest recordings. That legendary Miserere of Allegri — made when the group was barely six or seven years old, still raw with discovery — isn’t the version included. What we get instead is the second recording, incorporating embellishments devised by soprano Deborah Roberts. Except we don’t hear much of them, since verses 7 through 18 have been omitted. A small frustration.
The recordings span roughly twenty-seven years, and sixty-five singers are listed in the booklet — a number that surprised me, actually. Several have gone on to distinguished solo careers. Yet the ensemble’s sound has stayed remarkably stable, which tells you everything about Peter Phillips. He has always known precisely what he wants: that cool, luminous, almost glassine blend, the tuning ruthlessly clean, the lines shaped with long breath and no vibrato fuzz to cloud the counterpoint. It’s a sound you’d recognize in a dark room.
Some variation exists, appropriately. The approach to Byrd carries a different weight than Victoria — more harmonic tension, more of that peculiarly English quality of suppressed feeling. Phillips has always understood these distinctions without making a fuss about them.
Disc venues account for some of the sonic differences across the set. The group began at Merton College, moved for years to the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul at Salle in Norfolk — that warm, slightly remote acoustic that suited them so well — and the St. John’s, Hackney sessions, particularly the Byrd pieces closing disc two, sound different enough to notice. The room is drier, closer. It changes the character, though not unpleasantly.
Two Taverner items on the second disc appear to be newly recorded, drawn from a forthcoming disc devoted to that composer. They fit seamlessly — which is either proof of consistency or evidence that some music simply sounds like itself regardless of when you capture it.
Forty years, sixty-five singers, one sound. Whatever you think of that sound — and some listeners find it too studied, too antiseptic — the achievement is undeniable. This set documents it honestly, generously, and with enough variety to remind you why the Tallis Scholars mattered in the first place. They still do.
