The Tallis Scholars
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Friday, April 10, 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 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 cantus firmus 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 Renaissance and the present day. in opening soprano line of the Gloria—before Setting the music of William Byrd 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 Thomas Tallis, 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 Latin 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- motet 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 polyphony 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 cyclic Mass settings of the Notre-Dame school “Incipit” opening—rapt, almost chant-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- homophony 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 antiphon, 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 England’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 choir 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.