Review

Oberlin Artist Recital Series: Tallis Scholars (February 15)

By Nicholas Jones

The pressures of thought and feeling in Catholic Europe of the second half of the sixteenth century were intense: church and princes alike faced the parallel threats of Protestant in the north, war at home, and humanism in the soul. It is no wonder that the music of the day is so deeply marked with signs of that anguish.

On Wednesday, the Tallis Scholars brought their version of that struggle to Oberlin’s Finney Chapel, in a program called “Renaissance Mavericks.” Here was Renaissance music that put your teeth on edge (in a good way)—intentional dissonances, sudden and wrenching modulations, deferred cadences, chilling chromatic scales. Even before that leap into expressive operaticism that Monteverdi called “seconda prattica,” these mavericks were writing spectacularly inventive, disturbing, and fascinating music.

The entire first half consisted of Carlo Gesualdo’s nine responsories for the service of Tenebrae on Holy Saturday, the church’s formal act of mourning for the crucified Jesus. These pieces, each a masterpiece of Counter-Reformation emotional music, are often sung individually. The Tallis—twelve remarkable singers led by the multiply-talented Peter Phillips—made the whole more than the sum of its parts. Each piece is a challenge in itself, but for a choir to learn all nine, to sing them in sequence without a break, and to find a through-line for the group as a whole, is an astonishing feat.

Within a single trajectory of grief, we experienced a range and variety of sound and feeling. Intense dissonances (not the sweet suspensions of standard Renaissance polyphony, but an in-your-face flaunting of the rules) would suddenly and unexpectedly turn into the clearest of consonances. A chord would stretch the gamut from deep bass to high soprano, as if pulling us vertically apart on that terrible axis of hell and heaven; at other times, the voices would intertwine around the middle ranges, knotting the lines around each other like bands of sackcloth.

The Tallis Scholars have a clear, utterly vibrato-free and pitch-secure tone that has long stood as a model of Renaissance choral singing. Combine that with a rigorously consistent sense of the vowel and you get chords that are breathtakingly beautiful. What this maverick music made us realize as well is the range and expressive power of the group, able to turn on a dime from the dark, almost despairing gloom of a phrase like “inter mortuos” (among the dead) to the brightness of the wholly unexpected sequel: “liber” ([I am] free).

The second half of this “maverick” program kept a focus on musical innovations, but broadened the range of text and style with a series of eight individual pieces, each by a different composer. I’ll mention just three of the highlights: a lovely, weary meditation on death by the Flemish composer Giaches de Wert; a piece by the Italian Cipriano de Rore for four male voices on a text of the Latin poet Catullus, the singers sliding about perilously (and with utter assuredness) on a slippery plane of chromaticism; a small, powerful piece by the German Hans Leo Hassler (“Ad Dominum cum tribularer”) that seemed never to rest in cadence, but in every momentary ending generated a new complication.

The audience was, as one might expect, enthusiastic. It was good to see that the Oberlin students showed their appreciation of the virtuoso musicianship as well as the maverick quality of the music. In return, the Tallis gave us a beautiful encore from about a century later, the ten-voice version of the “Crucifixus” of Antonio Lotti.

Nicholas Jones is Professor of English at Oberlin College, and a keen amateur musician.

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Published on ClevelandClassical.com February 18, 2012

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