PhilPaine.com

The Huel­gas Ensem­ble, under the direc­tion of Paul Van Nev­el, put togeth­er a col­lec­tion of Renais­sance poly­phonic works for large choirs, which they called “Utopia Tri­umphans”. In fact, these works are for huge choirs. It starts with Thomas Tallis’ aston­ish­ing 40-part motet Spem in ali­um, and ends with Alessan­dro Striggio’s 40-part Ecce beat­am lucem. Striggio’s piece was per­formed in Eng­land in 1567, and caused such a stir that it was tak­en as a chal­lenge. It is said that Tallis was com­mis­sioned to com­pose an “answer”, and Spem in ali­um was the result (how­ever some author­i­ties doubt this story).

Motets on this scale are very dif­fi­cult to mount. The man­u­script kicked around for cen­turies, but no doubt those who looked at it shrugged their shoul­ders. Inter­est­ing, but too much work to put on, and Tallis had lit­tle sell­ing pow­er. His rep­u­ta­tion was eclipsed by his pupil William Byrd, and if Ralph Vaugh­an Williams had not com­posed his Fan­ta­sia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, few would have heard his name. But in 1965, the choir of King’s Col­lege Cam­bridge took a chance, and record­ed it. Sub­se­quently, there was a revival of inter­est in Tallis, and today I noticed a site list­ing it among the “top 10 essen­tial choral pieces”. There have been many record­ings of it, the most well known being that of the Tallis Schol­ars. Per­haps the most amaz­ing trib­ute to the work is in the Nation­al Gallery of Cana­da, in Ottawa. Here, Maya 3D mod­el­ing soft­ware, laser scan­ning and pho­togram­me­try were used to accu­rately recre­ate the inte­rior of a beau­ti­ful con­vent chapel which, unfor­tu­nately, had to be demol­ished. With­in this mod­el (where even the “sun­light” in the stained glass is arti­fi­cial), forty speak­ers set around the chapel each play the sound of a sin­gle voice of the forty-part choir, allow­ing for an espe­cially intense, and vari­able expe­ri­ence of the piece.

And the piece is amply worth such scruti­ny. Begin­ning sim­ply, and build­ing up a kind of Grand Cen­tral Sta­tion of mur­mur­ing voic­es, atop which floats a sopra­no line of haunt­ing beau­ty, the motet final­ly bursts forth in a dra­matic tut­ti on the for­ti­eth bar. This is not just a motet made large by bloat­ing. Each part is nec­es­sary to make this com­plex piece work.

It was the first Kings Col­lege Cam­bridge record­ing that over­whelmed me, when I came across it in a cut-out bin, when I first began seri­ously lis­ten­ing to music. Since then, I’ve heard sev­eral record­ings, includ­ing a sec­ond one by Kings, and one live per­for­mance in Toronto’s Angli­can cathe­dral. I have to say that there was some­thing spe­cial and mag­i­cal about that first record­ing. KCC made no attempt to hide, by under­em­pha­sis, the Renais­sance fea­tures that would now be inter­preted as dis­so­nant. And in 1965, the choir pos­sessed a boy sopra­no whose voice was down­right super­nat­ural. Record­ings sub­sti­tut­ing a female sopra­no do not do the job. Unfor­tu­nately, the record­ing I love has not been made into a cd, as far as I know.

I didn’t care for the ver­sion record­ed by Huel­gas Ensem­ble, but the oth­er pieces in their col­lec­tion, by Con­stanzo Por­ta, Josquin desPrez, Johannes Ock­egham, Pierre de Manchicourt,and Gio­vanni Gabrieli, are all beau­ti­ful. Most of them can’t be found else­where. They’re all unusu­ally large-scale pieces, with the excep­tion of Manchicourt’s six-voice Lau­date Dominum, which is includ­ed to pro­vide a brief relief from the grandeur. Striggio’s “chal­lenge” is very grand indeed, but it’s not as haunt­ing or sub­tle as Tallis’ “answer”.