Tallis: Videte miraculum

Stile Antico’s newest programme centres on Tallis’s magnificent 7-part ‘Christmas’ Mass, based on the festive plainchant Puer natus est, in a new edition prepared by Sally Dunkley. The mass is interspersed with seasonal Tudor music, including Byrd’s exquisite Propers for the fourth Sunday of Advent, responsories by Taverner and Sheppard, Robert White’s exuberant setting of the Magnificat, and Tallis’s own sublime Videte miraculum.

Matthew O’Donovan’s booklet note cannot be bettered in terms of historical context, analysis and relevance. Stile Antico is much in demand in concert, performing regularly throughout Europe and North America in repertoire ranging from English Tudor composers to the Flemish and Spanish schools and early Baroque. Their recordings on the harmonia mundi label have enjoyed huge success, and their release Song of Songs won the 2009 Gramophone Award for Early Music.

Our second October release from Westminster Abbey tells the story of the religious and political turmoil that engulfed England in the sixteenth century, and from which composers of liturgical music could find no escape. They were forced to follow the changing edicts about permitted texts as the pendulum of power oscillated between traditional and reformed religion. Interestingly, this period saw the greatest flowering of church music in England’s history; some of the most magnificent works of the age are recorded here.

November 1558 is the chronological centrepoint of this disc. The first half of the programme consists of music performed (not necessarily in all cases composed) during Mary’s reign; the second half, beginning with the evening canticles from Sheppard’s Second Service, explores something of the immense variety of sacred music produced during the subsequent, much longer and more celebrated reign of Mary’s Protestant half-sister.

Booklet essay, sung texts & translations

Recording made in 1989

Thomas Tallis (c1505-85) lived through one of the most turbulent and dangerous periods in English history. Entering in to the service of Waltham Abbey in 1538 his employment looked secure, writing masses and music for the many religious festivals and services. Henry VIII’s simmering row with Rome over his divorce from Queen Katherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn finally boiled over, and in 1540 Waltham Abbey was ‘taken down’. The break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries meant that Tallis was out of work. He received severance pay, and with these funds purchased a quantity of musical manuscripts and a technical manual on polyphonic music. Armed with the knowledge from these materials, he obtained his next job as a member of Henry VIII’s Chapel Royal. Here Tallis weaved a dangerous path over the shifting sands of political intrigue and religious persecutions to serve not only Henry, but Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I.

It is for the Anglican Church under Elizabeth that he made his greatest contribution to English music. If the Queen knew of his Catholic leanings, she was untroubled – in fact she was by all accounts far more tolerant of such things than either her Protestant brother Edward VI or her rabidly anti-Protestant Catholic sister ‘Bloody’ Mary. Tallis’s masterpiece, the 40 part motet Spem in alium was commissioned by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. It was intended to surpass a work for 40 voices by Alessando Striggio, which is does with ease. By way of a footnote, Howard was executed in 1572 for his involvement in a catholic plot to assassinate Elizabeth.

‘This is King’s College Choir at its most typical: assured, technically precise, with a marvellously professional attention to detail, but quite unfussed; a precision which simply lets the music speak for itself, in the characteristic acoustic of the great perpendicular chapel. In the two Lamentations settings one has the rare chance of hearing the men alone – a fine rich sound. Their calm restraint is admirable, the balance of the voices impeccable and there is some remarkable phrasing’ Gramophone, December 1990

Though he lived through some of the most tumultuous times in English history, from the reigns of Henry VII to Elizabeth I, Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585) composed music for both the Catholic and Anglican churches that resounds the world over to this day.

Whether singing the monumental splendour of his famous 40-part motet Spem in alium or the intimate prayer I call and cry to thee, O Lord, the internationally renowned Oxford Camerata conducted by Jeremy Summerly are perfectly attuned to Tallis’s timeless genius.

A meditative album of music linked to the Sherborne missal, an important manuscript associated with Sherborne Abbey which celebrates its 1300th anniversary in 2005. Sung by Magdala, Oxford's leading mixed-voice choir, it contains both gentle plainchant and magnificent full-bodied choral music with Renaissance masterworks by some of the greatest composers of their age.