Composer: Thomas Tallis
Performer: The Cardinall’s Musick
Conductor: Andrew Carwood
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Hyperion
Catalogue: CDA67548
Release: 2005
Size: 288 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. Jesu salvator saeculi
02. Gaude gloriosa
03. Sermone blando angelus
04. Magnificat a 5
05. Nunc dimittis a 5
06. Mihi autem nimis
07. Absterge Domine
08. Derelinquat impius
09. Loquebantur variis linguis
10. Suscipe quaeso Domine
11. O nata lux de lumine
Hyperions record of the month for July celebrates the (probable) 500th anniversary of the birth of Englands first superstar composer, Thomas Tallis, and welcomes the signing to the label of The Cardinalls Musick and Andrew Carwood. In a fifteen-year history The Cardinalls Musick has progressively built an enviable reputation for excellence. Some twenty recordings on the ASV Gaudeamus label have seen accolades from around the world, including a Gramophone Award and a Diapason dOr, while in the concert hall and workshop the group has consistently displayed innovation and a freshness of approach, whether tackling contemporary works (many of them commissions) or sharing the fruits of years of research into the music of the English Renaissance. With this first recording for Hyperion, The Cardinalls Musick turns to the period of its namesake, Cardinal Wolsey, and specifically to the music of Thomas Tallis. Gaude gloriosa takes centre stage. One of a series of monumental and extended motets (each lasting getting on for twenty minutes), this should be regarded as the summation of the genrewhereas Talliss earlier attempts such as Salve intemerata or Ave Dei Patris filia can seem to ramble somewhat, in Gaude gloriosa we find a sure-footed and eloquent response to an unusual text in honour of the Virgin Mary, and a work which takes singer and listener alike into a world of unremitting fervour. Other works on this recording include the famous Loquebantur variis linguis and O nata lux settings, the five-voice Latin Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, and Suscipe quaeso Dominewhere a particularly gloomy text (thought to have been written to mark Englands reconciliation with Rome on the accession of Mary Tudor) elicits from Tallis some truly extraordinary and rhetorical effects with harmonic shifts which are every bit as shocking today as they must have been at the works first performance in 1554. Future plans for The Cardinalls Musick on Hyperion include the completion of their on-going remarkable series encompassing the complete Latin church music of William Byrd.
William Byrd is the root, but Thomas Tallis is the flowering of English music. The sacred works he composed for Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth defined the character of English music the way those sovereigns defined the character of the English nation. The thematic clarity, the harmonic lucidity, the modal austerity, the rhythmic inevitability, and especially the exalted sense of spiritual ecstasy, all the things that distinguished English music from Continental music for two centuries first became fully themselves in Tallis. This disc of his works for the Chapel Royal, with Andrew Carwood leading the Cardinall’s Musick, a 16-voice choir from England, does everything a Tallis disc should do and does the one thing a Tallis disc has to do supremely well. The clarity of the singing, the lucidity of the textures, the austerity of the intonation, and the inevitability of the rhythms are impeccable, but the ecstatic sense of spiritual exaltation is truly awe-inspiring. English music doesn’t get any better than this. Hyperion’s January 2005 recording is lush and open and warm.