Arvo Pärt and the Tallis Scholars

The Tallis Scholars sing more than just Renaissance music. The world-renowned ensemble is equally praised for bringing fresh interpretations to music by contemporary composers, including Arvo Pärt.

About Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt (b.1935)

Born 11 September 1935, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is perhaps one of the most widely recognized composers of the 20th and 21st centuries. His œuvre is classical and religious in scope. Since 1976, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-invented compositional technique, tintinnabuli (Read our article The Tintinnabuli of Arvo Pärt from last September).

REMEMBER THIS...? Luminous Voices kicked off its fifth anniversary last fall with a performance of of Pärt's Berliner Messe.

The Woman with the Alabaster Box

Though written many centuries later, the work of Arvo Pärt owes much to the Renaissance manner of musical expression. A number of his works set passages from the Gospels, in a narrative manner that eschews overt text expression in favour of lending the words a sort of gilded clarity. The Woman with the Alabaster Box is the story of is an almost trance-like recitation, beautiful in its restraint, condensing the texture for Jesus’ words before expanding it again for the climax.

The Woman with the Alabaster Box is a setting of a Biblical text (Matthew 26: 6-13). Alabaster is a strong, dense stone, similar to marble, that can be found in Israel and the surrounding areas. This beautiful, precious stone was used to add beauty to Solomon's Temple (1 Chronicles 29:2). Because of its beauty and strength, alabaster was often used for storing precious perfume. 

• VIDEO: A live recording of The Tallis Scholars singing The Woman with the Alabaster Box by Arvo Pärt at a concert in Amasterdam (01 May 2016). Scroll to 11:37 for the performance.

VIP Experience with Peter Phillips

We are just over two weeks away from copresenting The Tallis Scholars at the Bella Concert Hall! The Grammy-nominated early music ensemble, founded and directed by Peter Phillips, is currently on a tour of the US and Canada, with the final concert in Calgary on Tuesday 24 April!

We are pleased to offer a VIP experience to meet Maestro Phillips after the concert in Calgary. Tickets for this VIP experience -- as well as for general admission -- are still available but going fast! Please join us!

Alonso Lobo: Versa est in luctum

Victoria isn't the only Spanish Renaissance composer represented on The Tallis Scholars' tour program. Alonso Lobo, a composer of the later Renaissance whom Victoria himself considered to be his 'equal', composed the motet Versa est in luctum in 1598, and will be performed when The Tallis Scholars visit Calgary on Tuesday 24 April at the Bella Concert Hall.

BIOGRAPHY

Alonso Lobo
(1555-1617)

Born in Osuna in 1555, Alonso Lobo actively composed a full generation after Tomás Luis de Victoria (read our article about Victoria's Missa pro defunctis à 6). His works include masses and motets, three Passion settings, Lamentations, psalms and hymns, as well as a Miserere for 12 voices (which has since become lost). No secular or instrumental music by Lobo is known to survive today.

Lobo's known styles range from a typically Spanish (and beautiful) blending of the Palestrinian idiom with a lively, erudite profundity to the majestic polychoral manner of Tomás Luis de Victoria. Some of his music also uses polychoral techniques, which were common in Italy around 1600, though Lobo never used more than two choirs at a time.

Lobo's legacy reaches far beyond the borders of his native Spain: in Portugal, and as far away as Mexico, for the next hundred years or more, he was considered to be one of the finest Spanish composers.

Versa est in luctum

Lobo's most famous work is the motet Versa est in luctum, which he composed upon the death of Phillip II of Spain in 1598. In Spanish liturgical tradition at the time, it was customary for a sermon to be preached at the end of the Requiem mass, before administering the last rites. In some instances, a motet was sung between the oration and the absolution. Lobo's Versa est in luctum is such a piece.

Lobo's work is for six voices, and shows the great salient features of Spanish liturgical music at the time. The composer's ideal is to intensify the meaning of the text, which was in line with the aims of the Counter-Reformation. The text vividly describes poetic imagery of heavenly harps, organs and voices in songful mourning. Out of the slow river of beautiful notes, stunning phrases sometimes emerge, or bold homophonic internal gestures divert the forward motion somewhat. The full choir is present almost throughout, and Lobo creates, with his wall of gorgeous sound, an appropriately majestic work of mourning.

TEXT

Versa est in luctum cithara mea,
et organum meum in vocem flentium.
Parce mihi Domine, 
nihil enim sunt dies mei.

TRANSLATION

My harp is turned to grieving
and my flute to the voice of those who weep. 
Spare me, O Lord,
for my days are as nothing.

• VIDEO: Listen to The Tallis Scholars' recording of Lobo's Versa est in luctum

Mouton: Quis dabit oculis nostris

Did you join us for A Luminous New Year's Eve a few months ago? If so, you may remember an exquisite song by French composer Jean Mouton on our program, his Nesciens Mater Virgo verum. The Tallis Scholars will sing another of Mouton's masterpieces when they visit Calgary on April 24th: his Quis dabit oculis nostris.

About Jean Mouton

Jean Mouton
(c.1459-1522)

Jean Mouton was a highly influential French composer and teacher of the Renaissance. A principal composer of the French court, one of his students was Adriaan Willaert, the Flemish composer who contributed greatly to the development of the Italian madrigal, and established Venice as an influential musical centre in the 16th century.

Because he was a principal composer for the French court, many of Mouton's works survive. He often composed music for state occasions such as weddings, coronations, papal elections, births, and deaths. One of these works, Quis dabit oculis nostris, was written for Queen Anne of Brittany, wife of King Louis XII of France, who died on 09 January 1514.

Quis dabit oculis nostris

Notes by Timothy Dickey, AllMusic
Accessed 03 April 2018

Mouton's four-voiced motet Quis dabit oculis nostris proved so popular it was still being printed nearly 50 years after Anne's death. The text borrows excerpts from her funeral sermon; it alludes to biblical texts which may have been read and it quotes the Requiem Mass. Throughout his setting of this potent text, Mouton maintains a tight control over musical expression, straining his art to incite the just grief of his French listeners.

The opening text quotes from Psalm 42. Listen for when the text first mentions the "fountain of tears" (fontem lachrymarum): Mouton writes a suddenly deep sonority followed by a trickling melisma. The text's rhetorical questions which follow, directly asking Brittany and France herself why they mourn, appear in paired duos; the composer repeats the strongest of these, "Does lamentation consume you?" twice, dramatically shifting to chordal homophony. The choir, speaking as it were in one voice (again homophonically), also repeats the punchline "defecit Anna" (Anne is dead.) The first part of the motet closes with a lengthy "musical" conclusion, "The joy of our hearts is converted to the sorrow of our song." The text alludes to Job 30, the common funeral motet text "Versa est in luctum."

The second part answers the earlier rhetorical questions with a series of mournful commands to the French people: "Therefore, cry out, O young men; weep, priests; wail, ye old; mourn, O singers...." Each new imitation takes on a slightly different melodic character. But again Mouton's counterpoint serves in total more to balance the weightiest command, that all France say, "Anna! Rest in peace!" The fermata-marked block chords return to support a descending melody in the highest voice twice crying her name. The "Requiescat in pace," the last words sung in both the Requiem Mass and the funeral service, is also repeated. Mouton transposes the same music down a third the second time, vividly embodying the national depression. The cadence of the last "Amen" fails to resolve the grief in this world.

TEXT

Quis dabit oculis nostris fontem lacrimarum?
Et plorabimus die ac nocte coram
Domino?

Britannia, quid ploras?
Musica, cur siles?
Francia, cur inducta lugubri veste
moerore consumeris?
Heu nobis, Domine, defecit Anna,
gaudium cordis nostri.
Conversus est in luctum chorus noster,
cecidit corona capitis nostri.
Ergo eiulate pueri, plorate sacerdotes,
ululate senes, lugete cantores,
plangite nobiles, et dicite:
Anna requiescat in pace. Amen.

TRANSLATION

Who will give to our eyes a well of tears?
And shall we weep day and night before the Lord?

Brittany, why do you lament?
Music, why are you silent?
France, why dressed in clothes of mourning
do you waste away in sorrow?
Woe to us, Lord, for Anne is gone,
the joy of our hearts.
Our song is turned into mourning,
and the crown has fallen from our heads.
Therefore cry out children, weep priests,
howl old men, mourn singers,
lament noblemen, and say:
May Anne rest in peace. Amen.

Palestrina: Missae Papae Marcelli

You can't have a Renaissance concert without Palestrina, right? The Tallis Scholars will perform an excerpt from one of Palestrina's most recognizable works: the Missae Papae Marcelli. 

BIOGRAPHY

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1525-1594) ranks as one of the towering figures in the music of the late 16th century. He was primarily a prolific composer of masses and motets but was also an important madrigalist. Among the native Italian musicians of the 16th century who sought to assimilate the richly developed polyphonic techniques of their French and Flemish predecessors, none mastered these techniques more completely

The scope of Palestrina’s work is enormous even by the standards of such prodigious contemporaries as Lassus and Monte, and it is centrally devoted to sacred music. His output of 104 securely attributed masses is greater in quantity alone than that of any composer of his age. To this fundamental domain of sacred music can be added more than 300 motets, 68 offertories, at least 72 hymns, 35 Magnificat settings, 11 litanies and four or five sets of Lamentations. But he also composed more than 140 madrigals (including some very famous pieces) if his spiritual madrigals are counted alongside his settings of secular poetry. Although he was the first 16th-century composer whose works were produced in a complete edition as early as the 19th century and for whom a second one has been achieved in the 20th, a number of works attributed to him in manuscript sources remain of doubtful authenticity, and a comprehensive catalogue of Palestrina sources remains to be achieved.

MISSA PAPAE MARCELLI

The Missa Papae Marcelli, composed c.1561, is dedicated to Pope Marcellus II, who established the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent, a gathering of the Catholic world which took place in the middle of the sixteenth century, was convened to discuss responses to the movement of Protestant reform sweeping across the continent. Many delegates felt that secular music was an inappropriate model, and that words had become unintelligible. Legend has it that the Missa Papae Marcelli was written to prove that polyphony could fulfil these requirements. The Agnus Dei is classic Palestrina, a seamless and smooth polyphony. Romantic legend has it that, because of the clarity with which Palestrina treated the text, with this mass he ‘saved church music’

• DID YOU KNOW... Luminous Voices performed the Missa Papae Marcelli at its first A Luminous New Year's Eve concert in December 2015. 
• VIDEO: The Tallis Scholars perform Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli. The 'Agnus Dei', which is featured on the tour programme, begins at 28:35.