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| Swirling
aura: the Tallis Scholars. |
Perfect
Flow
By
Paul Rapp
The Tallis Scholars
Tanglewood
Music Center, Ozawa Hall, Lenox, Mass., Aug. 17
It was probably 10 years ago when I heard the late Karl Haas,
host of the Adventures in Good Music radio show, play
the Tallis Scholars’ recording of Thomas Tallis’ (1510-1585)
Spem In Alium. It put me into a deep trance. You can
have every Euro-trash DJ in Mykonos; a 10-voice British a
cappella ensemble singing dense 450-year-old church music
was making me seriously crazy. I promised myself that if they
ever came hereabouts I’d be there.
The Tallis Scholars hit Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall last week
and played to a packed house and lawn, and caused the same
sort of delirium I’d experienced at my desk 10 years ago.
Interestingly (or not), the group played nothing composed
by its namesake, but rather stuff by mostly German composers
from the same time period, working in the same sonic territory.
The point, apparently, was that many of the pieces had been
heard by a very young Mozart (this being, of course, the big
Mozart 250th birthday summer), and strongly influenced the
young genius. Indeed, this music does provide a bridge between
the starkness of the Gregorian chant, and the richness of
Renaissance-era orchestral music.
The slow-moving, constantly shifting music is some of the
most ethereal, even trippy, music ever devised. As predictable
as the blues, the pieces were the aural equivalent of watching
waves from a sea shore, the music would ebb, flow, cross,
repeat, and inexorably wind up resolving pleasurably on the
shore of a big, satisfying major-chord “amen.”
The 10 Scholars, dressed in black, shifted positions on the
stage as appropriate to each piece, sometimes women on one
side, men on the other, sometimes split into two mirrored
quintets. Most pieces had no featured singer; parts were doubled,
or tripled, adding considerably to the dream-like aura of
the performances. The sole exception to this was also the
stand-out piece: The second half of the program opened with
Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere, once one of the most sacred
pieces in the ecclesiastic repertoire. Five members remained
on the main stage, while four more were two stories up in
a stage-left balcony, and a lone tenor stood two stories up
stage right. The extremely slow and sorrowful work, with sounds
soaring out of the far corners of the acoustically crisp Ozawa
Hall, was utterly mind-blowing.
It did take me a little while to get used to the unamplified
sound of the voices. I’d been used to playing the Scholars’
music, completely inappropriately, at ear-splitting levels,
where their pure sound packs the sort of punch that would
make the likes of Rob Zombie turn white and leap out the nearest
window.
Coming back for a second curtain call, as the ensemble took
positions to perform another number, many in the crowd shrieked
and screamed. There’s a reason the Tallis Scholars have the
unlikely title of The Rock Stars of Early Music. There’s a
reason Sting and Sir Paul have sought them out. The Tallis
Scholars rock.
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