Cappella Romana sometimes presents other groups in line with what they do, and last Wednesday night it brought to Seattle The Tallis Scholars, one of the world’s top Renaissance interpretive ensembles with 40 years of superb performances under its belt, all with the same director, Peter Phillips.
Peter Phillips (Photo: Albert Roosenburg)
Performing, as Phillips said, for the first time ever in St. James Cathedral, where the acoustics lend themselves perfectly to the style of singing these ten singers do, the group performed several settings each of the Magnificat, the Lord’s Prayer, Ave Maria, and Nunc Dimittis. But what was unusual and fascinating was the juxtapositions of the groupings. Each had Renaissance composers, but also 20th-century ones.
Equally fascinating hearing these together was the similarity of atmosphere and emotion in each, no matter how many centuries apart in the writing, or the countries of origin, which ranged from England to Estonia to the Netherlands to the U.S. to France; or the branch of Christian faith: Catholic, Protestant, or Russian Orthodox; sung in Latin, English, German, Church Slavonic.
All was sung unaccompanied without any vocal vibrato even in the most modern of the works, such as those by Arvo Pärt or John Tavener. This made for pure intervals, and the unerring perfection of pitch by the performers led to breathtaking harmonies. This was not polyphonic in the sense of interweaving individual vocal lines. In general, it was more a steady beat with all groups moving on from note to note together, in four or five parts, sometimes with a short solo recitative to begin, and sometimes antiphonally with high voices answered by low ones.
From Magnificats by Praetorius, Gibbons and Part, to The Lord’s Prayer by John Sheppard, Tavener, Stravinsky, Palestrina and Jacobus Gallus, to Ave Marias by Jean Mouton, Stravinsky, Part and Johannes Eccard, to the Nunc Dimitis by Pärt, Andres Torrentes, and—unexpectedly—Gustav Holst, the sound rose and hung in the cathedral air even when the group sang quietly as it often did. When they did sing out, such as in Pärt’s ‘Bogoroditse Devo’ (Ave Maria), one would have imagined a much bigger choir as the sound swirled among the rafters. The style and harmonies of his three pieces were the most unusual of the evening, including the arrestingly different, long, melismatic phrases in his Nunc Dimittis, high and joyful, but at the same time completely in meditative sync with the rest of the evening’s works.
The whole made for a breathtakingly beautiful—one can hardly call it a performance though it was: maybe a prayer?—evening’s concert for a large and rapt cathedral audience. An encore by Monteverdi came at the end, a composer rarely sung by this group, Phillips said, as he wrote little that was entirely unaccompanied.
