When you undertake to present a composer’s “complete works”–especially a composer as prolific and long-lived as Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85)–it’s inevitable that not all of the music you encounter will be of equal substance and quality. This may be especially true of church composers who usually were more concerned with the practical needs of a specific service than with any notions of posterity’s adulation. None of the more complex anthems given here in this Volume 6 of Signum’s excellent ongoing series–Christ rising; O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit; Purge me, O Lord–reaches the peaks of Tallis’ great Latin-texted works, and none of the more straightforward anthems matches the elegant simplicity of his finest English pieces (e.g., If ye love me). Nevertheless, Tallis was one of the more notably successful composers in adapting to the vernacular style required under Queen Elizabeth I’s official Protestant proclamations for liturgical music, and this collection of anthems and service music shows Tallis’ resourcefulness in bringing a respectable measure of meaningful expression to often-square and metrically stiff tunes intended for congregational worship–particularly evident in the refined and often tenderly beautiful Tunes for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter that conclude the program. On the other hand, the strictly functional responses and collects and other service music–Preces; Venite; Te Deum, etc.–will appeal only to completists and devoted English church music lovers.
As with earlier volumes in this series, the singers are fully attuned to the style and show eminent respect for each piece; unfortunately, the sound is often characterized by a strangely glassy, prominent treble (dominated by one soprano voice) and obscure bass that in some works creates disparate rather than cohesive choral textures. Nevertheless, there are sufficient highlights to make this volume attractive to Tallis fans–the aforementioned Archbishop Parker tunes, the anthems Christ rising, Verily, verily I say unto you, and Remember not, O Lord God, and the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis canticles. Next, in Volume 7, we can look forward to some of Tallis’ most magnificent works, the Eliazbethan-era Latin-texted motets, including In manus tuas, O nata lux, In ieunio et fletu, and Spem in alium. I’m ready. [5/5/2004]
