Few early music ensembles have delved more assiduously into the sacred choral works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina than the Tallis Scholars, as those who have snapped up their Palestrina recordings on the Gimell label can attest.
This month being the 400th anniversary of the Renaissance master's death, it was both appropriate and timely of the 10-member English a cappella vocal group to bring a Palestrina program to Rockefeller Memorial Chapel Sunday as season finale of the University of Chicago International Early Music Series.
Since their founding by Peter Phillips in 1978, this group of former Oxford and Cambridge choral scholars have become celebrated for their perfect balance and blend of voices, their uncannily accurate intonation and the pristine purity of their vibrato-free tone.
All this was beautifully apparent in performances of works by Palestrina and Gregorio Allegri that floated with serene magnificence in the vaulted splendor of Rockefeller Chapel. Phillips precisely shaped the outer and inner impulse of each work. The musical unfolding was always fluid, carefully tailored to the acoustical space despite the Scholars having been forced to cut short their acoustical rehearsal. (They, and curtain time, were delayed because of a traffic jam outside the Auto Show at McCormick Place.)
In Palestrina's "Missa Veni creator Spiritus," which was preceded by the plainchant from which the mass derives, the melody hovered in the soprano line with truly ethereal refinement. Here, as elsewhere, Phillips savored the virtues of understatement, a capital idea in Renaissance church music, where less generally is more. When the director wished to underline an expressive point-"Et resurrexit," for example-only a slight increase in volume and tonal intensity was needed to make the desired effect.
The other Palestrina works-"Lamentations III," Magnificat (on the seventh tone) and two double-choir settings of "Alma Redemptoris Mater"-also were beautifully sung. In the eight-part setting of "Alma Redemptoris," a rich musical tapestry was woven as the choirs alternated, overlapped and finally merged in florid polyphony. The Magnificat was unusual for its two soprano parts (sung with two voices per part) illuminating the textures with an astonishing inward radiance of expression.
Allegri's "Miserere"-a Renaissance "greatest hit" if there ever was one-evoked the fervent grandeur of High Renaissance Catholic church music through the spatial separation of solo voices and choir, but especially through the soprano's hypnotically repeated high Cs, descending as if from on high. After so flawless a reading, one had no trouble tracing a line of influence from Allegri to the spiritual mysticism of composers Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki in the final decade of the 20th Century.