ARTS
Music
Toast to Tallis
Peter Phillips
Last Saturday (23 November) was, for me, the Big Day. Here was the only opportunity I shall probably ever have to celebrate the anniversary of my preferred, indeed eponymous, composer Thomas Tal- lis. It will almost certainly remain impossi- ble to find out when he was born, even which year he was born in, and in 50 years' time I shall no doubt be well past it, so Saturday, the exact anniversary of his date of death 400 years ago, was it. The occasion was marked by a party of suffi- ciently intimate proportions for everyone present to give a fine rendering of Byrd's lament on the death of his master — 'Ye Sacred Muses' — which ends with the unforgettable words 'Tanis is dead, and Music dies'; though a performance of the 40-part motet was not undertaken. I know that that was what he would have wanted. A cocktail was invented of gin, apple and orange juice, along with a number of other things less easily perceived but of due strength, and given the title Salve Intern- perata. A black deathday cake was hugely enjoyed, and fireworks were exploded into a bewildered neighbourhood. Earlier that happy day I had received a car number- plate from a friend in Washington DC which bears the unorthodox mark: TAL- LIS. This I duly attached to my Riley 1.5, in which I drove to, round and from Oxford, until I was stopped by the police. I told them that the press and radio had done next to nothing to notice this anniversary of one of our five greatest composers and that I was making a stand. I was breathalised at four in the afternoon. My friend in Washington told me that he had been similarly stopped on the high- road, on account of this plate, by someone who wanted to know if he was Estonian. Apparently Tallis is a common name in the Baltic states. This is of interest, in a sense, since it is a very rare name here; and no one has yet had the temerity to suggest that the great man was a Mongol. Vivat Thomas!
In order to get in the groove I have been going through the old recordings of Tallis's music held in the collection of the National Sound Archive. The experience has been something akin to standing before Cho- pin's grave in Pere Lachaise — as close as one can get to him in this world. Tallis's own grave in the Church of St Alphege in Greenwich was lost in 1711 when the building that he served was rebuilt. The oldest recording of Tallis extant was con- ducted by Michael Tippett in 1948, and consists of a performance of `Spem in aliurn' by the Morley College Choir. It takes up four sides of two 78s, and caused a great deal of excitement when it was released. It was one of the earliest per- formances in modern times, if not the earliest, which led to the suggestion that it should be performed in the Whispering Gallery of St Paul's Cathedral. The idea was that the 40 singers should be arrayed in a circle around the gallery, and that Tip- pett, in order to be equidistant from them all, would conduct from a platform sus- pended from the centre of the dome. In the Gramophone magazine for September 1949 Alec Robertson, reviewing the discs, commented that 'the best results will be got if one hears the recording at some distance, preferably in another room with the door open.' Obviously the remarkably complex detail of the writing failed to interest him, or perhaps he was just admitting defeat. He also commented that although he agreed the music was written by Tallis with performance in mind (doubts on this had been cast in the 17th century) he was 'not at all convinced that it was meant to be recorded'. Since then there have been at least six further recordings, two for this year, and countless performances including several abroad. By far the most popular single piece by Tallis on this count is the First Set of Lamentations, of which the Archive has evidence of about 18 record- ings, the earliest having been made in 1956.
The revival of interest in Tallis's Latin music has therefore been fairly recent, though his English music has probably been sung in the cathedrals almost without break from his time to ours. However, the music of William Byrd — Latin and En- glish — attracted the attention of recording engineers right from the beginning. A correspondent in the Gramophone of June 1928, in reviewing a recording of Palestn- na's Wissa Papae Marcell'', wrote, 'Let us see if the Westminster Cathedral Choir can record Byrd's bold strength; or whoever records, let us have Byrd.' In fact the choice of St John's College, Cambridge had already recorded Byrd's verse anthem (with string quartet) 'Have mercy upon me' and York Minster under Sir Edward Bairstow had done the same for Byrd's 'This day Christ was born'. Sir Richard Terry and the choir of Westminster Cathedral recorded Byrd's 'Ave regina' 10 1928. The earliest recordings of all were made by the great Anglican editor E.H. Fellowes who conducted the Choir of St George's Chapel, Windsor in, amongst other things, Gibbons's 'Hosanna' some- time in 1924. The sound of the choirs in those days was most peculiar, it must be said, with little attempt at tuning and blend, and some strongly Romantic inter- pretations, which involved Fellowes, of all people, in considerable slowings down at every cadence. Even the pronunciation was different in English then, so that the word 'ears' was perceptibly sung as two syllables. As a result I do not maintain that these performers were any 'nearer' the Tudors than we are, for all their priority 01 years; but I do suggest that some enterpris- ing record company might put together an anthology of them on compact disc. They are fascinating.
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