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Home , Caroline Trevor, Cyclic mass, Spem in alium, The Tallis Scholars, Thomas Tallis

Friday, April 10, 2015, 8pm First Congregational Church Peter Phillips, director Soprano Alto Tenor Amy Haworth Christopher Watson Emma Walshe Clare Wilkinson Simon Wall Emily Atkinson Bass Ruth Provost Tim Scott Whiteley Rob Macdonald

PROGRAM

Josquin Des Prez (ca. 1450/1455–1521) Gaude virgo

Josquin Missa Pange lingua Kyrie Gloria Credo Santus Benedictus Agnus Dei

INTERMISSION

William Byrd (ca. 1543–1623) Cunctis diebus

Nico Muhly (b. 1981) Recordare, domine (2013)

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) Tribute to Caesar (1997)

Byrd Diliges dominum

Byrd Tribue, domine

Cal Performances’ 2014–2015 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo.

26 CAL PERFORMANCES PROGRAM NOTES

he end of all our exploring will be Josquin, who built on the tradi- Tto arrive where we started and know the tion of the 15th century, developing the freer place for the first time.” So writes T. S. Eliot in parody and paraphrase mass techniques. A cel- his Four Quartets, and so it is with tonight’s ebrated example of the latter, the Missa Pange concert. A program of cycles and circles, of Lingua treats its plainsong hymn with great revisions and reinventions, this evening’s flexibility, often quoting more directly from performance finds history repeating in works it at the start of a movement—as we see here from the and the present day. in opening soprano line of the Gloria—before Setting the music of against moving into much more loosely developmen- Nico Muhly, the expressive beauty of Josquin tal counterpoint. Also of note is the equality of against the ascetic restraint of Arvo Pärt, the imitative (often canonic) vocal lines, and exposes the common musical fabric of two the textural variety Josquin creates with so few ages, exploring the long shadow cast by the voices, only rarely bringing all four together. polyphonic masters and the values of clarity, Colleague, collaborator, and possibly stu- conviction and drama they share with today’s dent of the elder , William Byrd’s choral composers. career spanned the greater part of the Tudor Listening to thrilling drama of Josquin’s dynasty, his musical style shifting and bend- Gaude Virgo, it is hard to believe that it only ing to religious changes throughout. The employs four voices. Such is the intricacy and texts used by all his works in tonight’s program variety of the counterpoint that this short mo- reflect the essential contradiction of the age tet carries the dramatic weight of a far larger in which the Latin rite persisted, though not and grander work. Narrating the life of the always publically or admissibly. The six-voice Virgin, each verse of the text opens with the ex- Cunctis Diebus is a solemn, some might hortation “Gaude”—rejoice. Josquin translates say unremitting, musical meditation on death this punchy urgency into his setting which, and longed-for salvation beyond. Taken from unusually, opens with extended sections for the Book of Job, the text is concise, allowing just two voices, deferring and deferring the Byrd’s waves of imitative to sustain climactic arrival of the full vocal texture. Pairs a generalized mood rather than offering more of upper and then lower voices jostle and chase episodic word-painting. The effect is hypnotic, in near-canonic imitation. Remembrance of colored occasionally by vivid details like the Christ’s death (“mortem”) quells the energy weeping suspensions that so closely mirror the briefly, but soon the rivaling triple and duple text at “Ut plangam.” meters restore the motet’s electric pulse, driv- Grief is further intensified with contem- ing the work through to its conclusion in an porary American composer Nico Muhly’s ecstatic Alleluia. The five sections compris- Recordare Dominum, written for the Tallis ing the Ordinary of the Mass—Kyrie, Gloria, Scholars. Setting a text from Lamentations Sanctus and Benedictus, and Agnus Dei—to- (“We have become orphans, fatherless, our gether form the backbone of the Renaissance mothers are like widows…”), the work is the tradition of church polyphony. Originally natural heir to the poignant settings of Victoria, treated as separate musical entities, the first Palestrina, Tallis, and White. After the formal settings of the Notre-Dame school “Incipit” opening—rapt, almost -like— created an entirely new musical genre: the the music becomes consumed by a repeating, template that would become the predominant restless plea: “recordare Dominum.” Its triplet large-scale musical form of the age, a touch- rhythms pulse through the whole score, a flut- stone for individual compositional skill and tering, uncertain heartbeat over which Muhly national polyphonic identity. weaves music of exquisite painfulness. The Cyclic Mass took many forms. The music of contemporary Estonian Foremost among its continental pioneers was composer Arvo Pärt is an exercise in aural

CAL PERFORMANCES 27 PROGRAM NOTES simplicity. Derived, mongrel-like, from his church, but for Byrd’s own community of re- studies of Gregorian chant, Renaissance po- cusant Catholics. While Tribue is striking for lyphony, and Russian Orthodox music, Pärt’s its emotional directness, in Diliges Dominum signature technique is a reverberant choral text and emotion are secondary to an academ- he terms “tintinnabuli.” With any ic musical exercise of tremendous sophistica- conventional sense of harmonic trajectory de- tion. Scored for eight voices, the work only re- nied, it is by varying vocal textures (including ally consists of four parts. Each pair of voices absolute silence) that he achieves his medita- (trebles, altos, tenors, basses) takes a single tive musical drama. part, but while one sings it from start to finish, A Tribute to Caesar is more typical of the other reverses this, singing from the end Pärt’s choral writing, using the relationships back to the beginning. If the resulting “crab” and tensions between consonance and dis- canon is more impressive in theory than in the sonance to paint an allusive, monochromatic ear, it’s still a meticulous and fascinating testi- musical canvass. This narrative account of mony to Byrd’s skill. Jesus’s encounter with the Pharisees sees Pärt’s Tribue Domine has been described as “the anti-dramatic approach used to paradoxically most ambitious composition written by Byrd in dramatic ends. Denied more conventional his early years.” Like Cunctis Diebus, it sees the developmental structures, Pärt instead uses young composer harking back to the outmod- voice pairings and ensembles to dramatize ed genre of the votive , eager to prove the story, deploying his forces with expressive his mastery. Divided into three sections— care. As ever with the composer, there is little Tribue Domine, Te deprecor, Gloria Patri—the spare musical flesh here. Nothing extraneous work is unified by shared motivic material. A or bulging deforms the pure musical silhouette gamut of technical processes (both advanced that Pärt so deftly sculpts. and rather more naïve), the work juxtaposes Both Diliges Dominum and Tribue Domine sections of homophony, polyphony (from two were originally published in Byrd and Tallis’s to six voices), and antiphony, all deployed in Cantiones Sacræ—two volumes of church mu- the service of the lengthy text—a heartfelt plea sic united by their Latin texts, a clear indica- for faith to shore up mortal weakness. tion they were intended not for the Protestant Alexandra Coghlan, 2015

28 CAL PERFORMANCES Saturday, April 11, 2015, 8pm First Congregational Church The Tallis Scholars Peter Phillips, director Soprano Alto Tenor Amy Haworth Caroline Trevor Christopher Watson Emma Walshe Clare Wilkinson Simon Wall Emily Atkinson Bass Ruth Provost Tim Scott Whiteley Rob Macdonald

PROGRAM

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) Triodion (1998)

William Byrd (ca. 1543–1623) Mass for Four Voices Kyrie Gloria Credo Santus Benedictus Agnus Dei

INTERMISSION

Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (ca. 1590–1664) Deus in adiutorium

Hernando Franco (1532–1585) Salve regina

Padilla Lamentations

Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505–1585) Lamentations I

Byrd Laudibus in sanctis

Cal Performances’ 2014–2015 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo.

CAL PERFORMANCES 29 PROGRAM NOTES

commission from Lancing College al- three words, but his music is expressive and A lowed Arvo Pärt to engage with the very singable. textures of ’s Renaissance compos- Of the Spanish composers who worked in ers—textures previously echoed and dissolved Central and South America, Juan de Gutiérrez into his music, but rarely so overtly or in such Padilla (1590–1664) is acknowledged to be a sustained way. In Triodon’s gently pulsing the most gifted. Trained in his home city of homophony, we can clearly hear the contem- Malaga, by 1622 he was an assistant at the porary ghost-double of Faburden chant, trans- cathedral of Puebla de Los Angeles in Mexico. formed here in collision with Pärt’s own Or- In 1629 he was appointed maestro there, and thodox faith and spare sound world. Together, he remained in Pueblo until his death in the three odes that make up this sequence 1664. Padilla proved himself to be a master form one of the composer’s most understated, of most of the sacred genres of his time, and inward works. Triodion is a musical medita- this is apparent in his six-part lamentations tion on salvation and an intercession, one the setting preserved in the Puebla Cathedral work’s unexpected final chord suggests may books. His careful but effective use of yet be answered. polyphonic, homophonic, and antiphonal A committed Catholic like Thomas Tallis, elements in setting these emotional texts his elder colleague William Byrd worked shows him to be as sensitive as his greatest through the tumultuous shifts of the English European contemporaries. Reformation, shifting between the liturgies Whether composed for liturgical use or and practices of vernacular Protestantism private Catholic devotions, Thomas Tallis’s and the Latin rites of Catholicism. One of Lamentations remain some of his most strik- three masses he composed during the 1590s ing and emotive works. The two sets (again, for secret performance by recusant Catholics, we hear only the first tonight) share the bleak- it represents a profound declaration of faith est of Holy Week texts, The Lamentations of in an England in which the celebration of the Jeremiah. Punctuated only by the meditative, Catholic Mass was forbidden. static treatment of the Hebrew letters (Aleph, The setting for four voices is characterized Beth), Tallis’s narrative achieves its height- above all by its expressive clarity. Rejecting ened poignancy through a distinctively Eng- the florid embellishments beloved of earlier lish treatment of dissonance, reframing his English composers, Byrd instead favors a harmonies such that the untroubled major closely woven, imitative polyphony almost tonality of “plorans, ploravit” becomes almost in the Flemish style. While this textural and unbearably charged. From the weeping, scalic melodic simplicity may have been enforced descent of the opening “Incipit lamentatio” by the restrictions of recusant performance, to the pulsing insistence of the closing “Jeru- Byrd transforms necessity into a virtue, with salem,” Tallis mirrors his text musically with the smallest of gestures (the contrapuntal painful mastery.Lively with syncopation and intensity of the closing “Dona nobis pacem,” rhythmic energy, Byrd’s Laudibus in Sanctis or the almost translucent delicacy of the is frankly madrigalian in its approach to its dovetailing lines of the Benedictus) gaining sacred text, a Latin paraphrase of Psalm 150 almost painful impact. “Praise God in his holiness.” The composer It is the Salve regina in the version for five delights in word-painting, offering up clashing voices that will be performed this evening. cymbals, declamatory , and a mighty The plainchant verses are taken from Luys organ in his dexterous textural manipulation de Villafranca’s tutor published in Seville in of his five voices. Dance is never far away in 1565. Franco set “Et Jesum benedictum” in two this musical act of praise, energizing even the versions, and we have used the second, which simplest homophony with syncopation and is for the high voices while the basses rest. culminating in pealing cries of “alleluia” that Franco is expansive, one might say diffuse; he echo contrapuntally through all the parts. takes 25 bars of modern score to set the last © 2015 The Tallis Scholars

30 CAL PERFORMANCES ABOUT THE ARTISTS Eric Richmond Eric

he tallis scholars were founded Kong, as well as extensive touring around Tin 1973 by their director, Peter Phillips. Europe and the . Their per- Through their recordings and concert perfor- formance at the BBC Proms 2014 saw the mances, they have established themselves as world première of Sir ’s Requiem the leading exponents of Renaissance sacred Fragments, a work written especially for the music throughout the world. Mr. Phillips has group. In a departure for the group in spring worked with the ensemble to create, through 2015, the Tallis Scholars will bring out a disc of good tuning and blend, the purity and clar- music by Arvo Pärt called Tintinnabuli. ity of sound which he feels best serve the Recordings by the Tallis Scholars have at- Renaissance repertoire, allowing every detail tracted many awards throughout the world. of the musical lines to be heard. It is the re- In 1987 their recording of Josquin’s Missa La sulting beauty of sound for which the Tallis sol fa re mi and Missa Pange lingua received Scholars have become so widely renowned. Gramophone’s “Record of the Year” award, the The Tallis Scholars perform in both sacred first recording of ever to win this and secular venues, usually giving around 70 coveted award. In 1989, the French magazine concerts each year across the globe. In 2013, the Diapason gave two of its Diapason d’Or de group celebrated their 40th anniversary with l’Année awards for the recordings of a Mass a world tour, performing 99 events in 80 ven- and by Lassus and for Josquin’s two ues in 16 countries and traveling sufficient air masses based on the L’Homme armé. miles to circumnavigate the globe four times. Their recording of Palestrina’s Missa Assumpta They kicked off the year with a spectacular est Maria and Missa Sicut lilium was awarded concert in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, includ- Gramophone’s Early Music Award in 1991; ing a performance of Thomas Tallis’s 40-part they received the 1994 Early Music Award motet and the world premières for their recording of music by Cipriano de of works written specially for them by Gabriel Rore; and the same distinction again in 2005 Jackson and . Their recording of for their disc of music by John Browne. The the Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas, by 16th-century Tallis Scholars were nominated for a Grammy Tudor composer , was released Award in 2001, 2009, and 2010. In November on the exact anniversary of their first concert 2012 their recording of Josquin’s Missa De bea- in 1973 and enjoyed six weeks at number one in ta virgine and Missa Ave maris stella received the U.K. Specialist Classical Album Chart. a Diapason d’Or de l’Année, and in their 40th Their 2014–2015 season sees tours of the anniversary year they were welcomed into the , China, South Korea, and Hong by public vote.

CAL PERFORMANCES 31 ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Peter Phillips has made Mr. Phillips has made numerous televi- an impressive if unusual sion and radio broadcasts. Besides those fea- reputation for himself in turing the Tallis Scholars (which include live dedicating his life’s work broadcasts from the 1988, 2001, 2003, 2007, to the research and per- 2008, 2011, 2013, and 2014 BBC Proms), he formance of Renaissance has appeared several times on the BBC’s polyphony. Having won a Music Weekly and on the BBC World Service, scholarship to Oxford in on Kaleidoscope (BBC Radio 4), on Today 1972, Mr. Phillips studied (BBC Radio 4), National Public Radio in the with Albert Roosenburg United States, and on German, French, Italian, David Wulstan and Denis Arnold, and gained Spanish, and Canadian radio, where he has experience in conducting small vocal ensem- enjoyed deploying his love of languages. In bles, already experimenting with the rarer 1990 ITV’s The South Bank Show featured parts of the repertoire. He founded the Tallis Mr. Phillips’s “personal odyssey” with the Scholars in 1973, with whom he has now ap- Tallis Scholars, while in 2002 a special televi- peared in almost 2,000 concerts and made sion documentary was made for the BBC about over 60 discs, encouraging interest in polyph- the life and times of William Byrd. ony all over the world. Mr. Phillips has recently been appointed Apart from the Tallis Scholars, Mr. Phillips a Reed Rubin Director of Music and Bodley continues to work with other specialist ensem- Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, where the bles. He has appeared with the BBC Singers, new choral foundation he helped to establish the Collegium Vocale of Ghent, and the began singing services in October 2008. They Netherlands Chamber Choir, and is current- gave their first live broadcast on BBC Radio ly working with the Chœur de Chambre de Three’s Choral in October 2011. In Namur, Intrada of Moscow, Musica Reservata 2005 Mr. Phillips was made a Chevalier de of Barcelona, and El León de Oro of Orviedo. l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French He gives numerous master classes and choral Minister of Culture, a decoration intended to workshops every year around the world— honor individuals who have contributed to the among other places in Rimini (Italy), Evora understanding of French culture in the world. (Portugal), and Barcelona (Spain). In 2014, he launched the London International A Cappella www.tallisscholars.co.uk Choir Competition in St. John’s Smith Square, www.tsss.co.uk attracting from all over the world. www.gimell.com

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