Adelaide Town hall. 3 Nov 2016
The Tallis Scholars are Renaissance choral music specialists, and they are at the pinnacle of their craft. Quite simply, they are without equal, and much of it is down to Peter Philips, their founder and conductor.
Philips has a sense of theatre. He has the choir file in and form a gentle crescent on the stage, and as it happened they were nearly in order of height. In what almost resembles a Mexican wave, they open their music scores one after the other, doing it all in reverse order when they file off at the end of the first half of the programme. When it is all over, and they depart the stage for the final time at the concert concussion, Phillips’ conductor’s score is left on his music stand centre-stage, illuminated by a bright spotlight from above. It is the score of the awe-inspiring Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis – that remarkable composer from the time of Elizabeth after whom the ensemble is named.
These are just little things that drive home the sense of occasion and make one realise that a performance by The Tallis Scholars is a special thing; something to cherish.
Philips places the members of his ensemble judiciously in relation to each other. For some pieces he has some of them stand in different places, presumably to facilitate them singing a different ‘voice’. In Arvo Pärt’s unusual Which Was The Son Of, Philips positions all the tenors and basses in the centre and flanks them on both sides with the altos and sopranos. The male ‘centre’ focuses our attention on the fact that the subject of the composition is the (male) genealogy of Jesus Christ (according the Gospel of Luke). It is perhaps the least successful piece of the evening. In John Taverner’s As One Who Has Slept, a quartet of voices is sent to a back corner of the stage and provides a liturgical drone effect common to Taverner’s music, underlining his attachment to the Russian Orthodox faith. It is a highlight of the evening.
But all roads point to the Spem in Alium – the finale of the evening – and everything else in the program which precedes it, and it is all exquisite, is doomed to take second chair. The ten Tallis Scholars are joined by thirty members of the internationally renowned Adelaide Chamber Singers. Their combined forces produce a world class performance and Philips remarks as much at the end of the performance. Of course he is right to say so.
So what does one do for an encore? How does one follow Spem in Alium? Well the answer is you don’t, you simply repeat it, at least some of it, and that is exactly what happened.
The audience leaves in a state of sublime contentment.
Kym Clayton
When: 3 Nov 2016
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
