Peter
Phillips and the Tudor Choir
St. Mary's
Roman Catholic Cathedral, Northwest 18th Avenue and Couch
Street, 228-4397, 8
pm Sunday, Sept. 19
$12-$18
So the chant craze of a few years ago has died out, and
you're wondering what is going to slow down the manic pace
of your crazy 9-to-9 world. As an odd fluke in the record
industry's never-ending search for the "next big thing,"
those mysterious monks intoning monophonic chants of the
Gregorian era somehow managed to sell discs like rock stars
and appeal to more people than even existed when the hymns
were written 1,000 years ago.
Chant even experienced the sincerest form of flattery that
our age has to offer--sampling. What the craze revealed
more than anything is that not all of Joe and Joanne Public
are happy with the same old groove and that they'll go back
a millennium to find what they're looking for.
So what's next? If Seattle's Tudor Choir has its way, it
will be Renaissance choral music, a sort of tapestry of
interwoven chant and the next logical step in music's harmonic
development. The rich textures and athletic harmonies of
Renaissance-era singing take the a cappella experience to
its zenith. The term "a cappella" literally means "as in
the chapel" and was first used to describe the music of
16th-century Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina,
one of the greats of Renaissance polyphony. This ain't your
distant granddaddy's troubadour song or madrigal. This is
sacred choral music designed to accompany the high mass
of the Christian liturgical celebration, and its goal is
nothing short of conveying the awe and devotion the singers
held for the supreme deity.
"There's a very basic quality inherent in this music,"
says Tudor Choir founder and artistic director Doug Fullington,
"an appreciation of the human voice from a time when religion
was very important to everyday life."
That sound is supremely important to Fullington. "Because
of the 'foreign' nature of the Latin text," he continues,
"you can concentrate on the pure instrumental quality of
the human voice. It's a very personal sound." It's that
personal purity that drew Fullington to Renaissance choral
music in the first place. After graduating from law school,
the ambitious Seattleite decided to start up an amateur
choral group in the late '80s. Called the English Singers,
the group included mostly friends with a common interest
in the music. As a first foray, it went well. But in 1993,
Fullington took his passion to a more professional level
and started the Tudor Choir.
As the name implies, the members of the Tudor Choir are
anglophiles, sticking largely to the work of the great English
Renaissance composers writing at the time of Mary Tudor's
reign as Queen of England. In the Middle Ages, England was
largely sheltered from the Continent and therefore developed
its own take on Renaissance polyphony.
"The English were more adventurous and free-form," says
Fullington, a scholar of Renaissance music as well as a
performer. "Unlike the Italians, who tended to repeat often
in a piece, the music of Tallis and Taverner avoids repetition
and is fresh from start to finish." Italian composers' alternating
melodies overlapped here and there along the way for grounding.
In the English school, it's a challenging race to the finish,
with no stops along the way.
One of Fullington's models in organizing the choir was
the great Oxford choral group of the English school, the
Tallis Scholars. Under the direction of Peter Phillips,
the Scholars set the standard for ensemble singing and in
their recording of Thomas Tallis' 40-voice motet Spem
in alium created one of the monumental Renaissance recordings.
Because of its larger size (18 voices), the choir is ideal
for grander works, and the Hilliard Ensemble's Paul Hillier
and Andrew Parrot of the Taverner Choir are among the guest
conductors who have led the group in the past. But working
with Phillips was certainly a dream of Fullington's. This
past May, at a pre-concert lecture before the Tallis Scholars'
Seattle performance, Phillips approached Fullington and
said, "I'd like to take a shot at the choir." Four months
later and here they are, with Phillips's wife and Tallis
Scholars partner Caroline Trevor in tow.
For the Portland performance, Phillips, Fullington and
the choir will stick to the composers they know best: Taverner,
Tallis, William Byrd, William Mundy and Robert White. The
program is a history of Tudor music ranging from an early
lady mass and psalm of Taverner's to Byrd's three-part motet
Tribue, Domine. This is challenging music for the
singers, but, of course, the challenge is meant to be invisible
to the audience. "It's not affected at all like Baroque
or Romantic music," says Fullington. "There's no extreme
dramatic tension, and it doesn't force an interpretation
on the listener."
As you sit and listen to the multiple voices snaking in
and out with apparent ease, you'd almost swear that all
is right in this crazy, mixed-up world--for a couple of
hours at least.
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Willamette Week | originally
published September 15,
1999
|
