What makes the Tallis Scholars so special is not what they sing, but how they sing it. Their founder-director Peter Phillips is, in the best sense of the word, a purist, who believes Renaissance sacred choral music can speak for itself, without exaggerated dynamics or dramatic excess.
Neither does it need sanctimonious presentation in subdued lighting: this was a wholly secular concert with applause between each item – and to the large audience’s credit, free of annoying coughs, fidgets or whooping at the end.
In a programme typical of what Phillips and his singers do so well, short pieces by Tallis, Taverner, Sheppard and the little-known Frenchman Jean Mouton – all performed with an elegance of line and tonal balance that enabled each voice to be heard in perfect relief – formed pithy contrasts to more extended helpings of our own century’s Arvo Pärt.
And Allegri’s Miserere, here given a spatial rendition with the choir divided on two levels and three plainsong tenors hidden echoingly away behind the organ, sounded as wonderful as we expected.
Even more rewarding were the four works by Pärt. ‘The Woman with the Alabaster Box’, in which sustained upper voices provide a connecting thread to a harmonised recitative, explored a wide range of tessitura and sonorities; ‘A Tribute to Caesar’, with the simplest of means, made poignant use of discords as parts nudged into each other; ‘Which was the Son of…’ offered a quite rhythmically catchy (for Pärt) account of Christ’s family tree; and ‘Triodion’, where Pärt echoes aspects of Renaissance style in an incantatory sequence of spiritual odes, hit all the right emotional buttons. Sheer magic.
