Alistair Dixon, Chapelle du Roi - Thomas Tallis: The Complete Works [10CDs] (2011)

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Alistair Dixon, Chapelle du Roi - Thomas Tallis: The Complete Works [10CDs] (2011)

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Tallis lived during a time of tremendous religious upheaval. The succession from Henry VIII to Edward VI, Edward to Mary Tudor and Mary to Elizabeth meant changes from Catholic to Protestant, and back again with Mary, before Elizabeth’s “third way” – a more accepting and moderate form of Protestantism.
Tallis lived through all of this, highly respected and admired in his day for his compositions, and, remarkably enough, managed to please each monarch in turn. During his life-time he produced some glorious, inspiring, and deeply uplifting music. This 10-disc set from Brilliant Classics, featuring the Chapelle du Roi, presents the complete works, including recordings of music that have hitherto been unrecorded. How lovely to have a complete set of works.
The first disc, entitled Music for Henry VIII, features sacred music written between around 1530 and 1540, a time when church music was at an apex. During this time, Tallis worked first as organist at the small Benedictine monastery of Dover Priory, then at St Mary-at-Hill in Billingsgate and then the Augustinian abbey of Holy Cross at Waltham in Essex. This was the last English abbey to be dissolved two years after Tallis had started working there. He then moved on to Canterbury Cathedral, where he was a lay-clerk for two years before being made a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, a role he kept for the rest of his life. This disc features the Mass Salve Intemerata, and opens with the glorious Ave Dei Patris Filia.
Disc two is Music at the Reformation. This was most likely all composed during the 1540s, a time of great change in religious practices in England, and the musical expression and accompaniment of the works reflect this. English translations of Latin liturgical texts were being made and set to music, although Latin texts never entirely went out of fashion during Tallis’s day. Here, we find a collection of both Latin (the Mass for Four Voices, Magnificat and Sanctus Deus, for example) and English works (such as If Ye Love Me, Remember Not, O Lord God).
The music on the third disc dates from the reign of Mary Tudor, during which the Latin rites were fully restored. The disc includes the substantial Mass Puer natus est nobis and the votive antiphon Gaude gloriosa.
Discs four and five are Music for the Divine Office – works composed for the Canonical Hours (eight daily services) - Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. Tallis’s music for these services probably mostly dates from his time as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and includes a Magnificat, Alleluia, offertory, responsories, organ music, antiphons, and hymns that are delightfully innovative, despite being, at their most basic levels, settings of original plainchants.
Music for a Reformed Church is the title of the sixth disc, comprising works written for the reformed services laid out in The booke of the common prayer, after the 1549 Act for the Uniformity of Service. This Act enforced services in the vernacular, and on this disc we have the standard daily liturgical sequence of Matins, Holy Communion, and Evensong (for which Tallis wrote canticles and anthems, the Venite, Te Deum, Benedictus, Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis, Kyrie and Credo), along with the associated intonations and collects. The disc concludes with the nine tunes which Tallis composed for Archbishop Matthew Parker’s Psalter.
Disc seven, featuring Latin motets, is entitled Music for Queen Elizabeth. During Elizabeth’s reign, the arts flourished, new ideas blossomed, and there was greater stability - both political, and also in culture and the arts. Tallis’s Latin motets demonstrate this, drawing as they do upon new compositional ideas from abroad, whilst being based in the English traditions. Mostly scored for five voices, they set both liturgical and non-liturgical texts, and include Tallis’s masterpiece Spem in Alium, for forty parts.
Lamentations and Contrafacta comprise disc eight, including two settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah and English versions of some of Tallis’s most celebrated Latin motets (including Sing and glorify heaven’s high majesty, an English rendition of Spem in alium).
The two final discs are recordings of the Instrumental Music and Songs. Whilst some of Tallis’s secular pieces are arrangements made of sacred works. An example can be found on the sixth track of disc 9, an adaptation of Tallis’s organ piece Felix namque - based on the plainchant melody) for lute – an instrument for which we have no extant works by Tallis. Other pieces may have been written for performance by secular musicians at the Tudor court, or for the training or teaching of choirboys, or even for choirboys’ plays. It is even possible that his keyboard works might have been written for Queen Elizabeth, a good amateur musician. Most of Tallis’s keyboard music and the partsongs - possibly also for choirboy plays - has come down to us from a manuscript anthology compiled by Thomas Mulliner in the late 1550s and early 1560s, and known as the ‘Mulliner Book’. Disc 9 concludes with William Byrd’s Ye sacred Muses, in which the one great composer laments the death of the other in a touching work of great power and intensity. The final disc features the Litany, Felix Namque in its original organ version, and the Verset I and II, of dubious authorship.
There are no sleeve-notes in this set. Rather, they are presented on a 75-page PDF on a CD-ROM, which include texts and translations, as well as extensive notes. Many, like me, may prefer an actual booklet; we may not always have a computer to hand when we want to listen to a disc! In the notes for the first four discs, whole swathes of text are repeated. Nevertheless, one can eventually discover all the information about these works and recordings that one wants to. The notes are very thorough and scholarly.
The performances on these discs are of the very highest quality. Chapelle du Roi is a highly respected group that specializes in sacred music of the renaissance period, making them perfect exponents of Tallis’s music. They are under the highly competent musicianship of their founding director Alistair Dixon. Other artists featured include organist Andrew Benson-Wilson, the early-music ensemble Charivari Agréable, Lawrence Cummings on virginals and harpsichord and Stephen Taylor, the superb counter-tenor in the songs on disc 9. On the whole, this is a splendid set - much wonderful music and exquisite music-making.

–Em Marshall

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Alistair Dixon, Chapelle du Roi - Thomas Tallis: The Complete Works [10CDs] (2011)

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