Peter Phillips and the Tallis Scholars have spent fifty years making the case that Renaissance polyphony is not a museum artifact but a living flame — that Tallis and Byrd and Palestrina speak to us still, directly, across the centuries. It is therefore not entirely surprising that Phillips would occasionally reach across to our own time, though he does so rarely enough that each excursion carries real weight.
Sainte-Chapelle arrived as one of two commissioned works for the ensemble’s fortieth anniversary concert at St. Paul‘s Cathedral in March 2013. Eric Whitacre — who has become, whether the academy approves or not, the most widely performed choral composer of his generation — was asked to write something new for the occasion. He visited Paris around that time and found himself stopped cold by the Gothic jewel box on the Île de la Cité. Anybody who has stood inside Sainte-Chapelle at the right hour, with the sun driving through those 6,400 square feet of medieval glass, understands immediately what happened to him.
What Whitacre did with that experience is the interesting question.
He turned to his longtime collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri for the text — a characteristic choice, since Whitacre has always worked best when poet and composer are in genuine conversation rather than one serving the other. Silvestri constructs a small narrative around the figure of a young girl hearing angels singing in the stained glass, and he weaves this story through the Sanctus text from the Mass. The conceit is almost dangerously sentimental. It works anyway.
The piece opens with the male voices alone, in plainchant — or something that breathes like plainchant, modal and unhurried, with that particular quality of sound that seems to come from inside the stone rather than from human throats. Phillips has calibrated his forces carefully here: ten singers total, with the basses and second sopranos slightly weighted at three voices each rather than the customary two. That small asymmetry matters. When the texture opens upward, the upper voices arrive not as a brightening but as a revelation — which is precisely what the narrative demands.
Whitacre’s harmonic language in his choral music has attracted a certain amount of condescension from people who ought to know better. Yes, he loves a suspended second, a cluster that refuses to resolve, a chord that hovers in tonal ambiguity. But he arrived at these things not through the influence of Arvo Pärt or John Tavener — though both names get thrown at him constantly — so much as through his early immersion in the American choral tradition and, by his own account, a transformative encounter with Lux Aurumque in manuscript that revealed to him what vowels and consonants could do to vertical harmony. His textures are not borrowed. They are hard-won.
Here, in roughly eight and a half minutes, he distills that language to something close to its essence. The piece builds through long, arching phrases — the kind of line that seems to lengthen as it rises, defying the breath that produces it — until the full five-part texture arrives with a weight that feels earned rather than imposed. Merton College Chapel, where this was recorded, gives the sound just enough bloom without turning everything to mush. Phillips knows exactly how much reverb a choral texture can absorb before clarity begins to dissolve, and he has found the right room.
The Tallis Scholars are, in the most precise sense of the word, impeccable. Their intonation in this music — which asks singers to sustain pitches against dense surrounding harmonics that will pull the ear toward false resolutions — is something close to miraculous. The blending is total, each voice present but none dominant. This is not the kind of choral sound that announces individual personalities, which is as it should be.
Whether Whitacre belongs in permanent company with the Renaissance masters Phillips has championed is a question this single piece cannot answer. What it does answer is whether he can write music of genuine spiritual weight without tipping into easy consolation. The girl in the stained glass hears her angels. So, finally, do we.
