National Youth Choirs of Great Britain

Tallis in a wonderland of a cappella choral works ancient and modern

 

Finding an appropriate companion piece to Tallis’s extraordinary 40-part Motet is no easy task. As Gabriel Jackson points out in his notes to this disc, the Tallis was neither the first nor the last piece of unaccompanied choral music to be written in 40 parts but “it remains an unparalleled tour de force of compositional virtuosity”. Rather than combine it with more Tallis or other English church music of the “Golden Age”, Mike Brewer has devised a programme which bookends a programme of a cappella choral works ancient and modern, English and foreign, with Spem in Alium and Jackson’s own response to it.

 

Sanctum est verum lumen itself comes across as an astonishing tour de force, the strands of musical texture cascading through this choir with glorious luminosity. These young singers take the work to heart and beyond the most incredible choral discipline and uniformity of tine that Brewer produces from well over 200 individual voices, there is a real sense of enthusiasm which never intrudes into the technical security of the performance but adds a lovely lustre to Delphian’s luxuriant recording. Equally impressive are the National Youth Choir of Great Britain’s performances of the other two contemporary works on the disc, Bo Holten’s hypnotic In nomine and Tarik O’Regan’s dramatic I sleep but my heart waketh.

 

Perhaps such enthusiasm of modern music which thrives on a big choral sound is understandable, but the earlier music also fares remarkably well in this overblown environment; even where, by the sound of it, reduced forces are involved, there is still a larger number of individual voices per part than we would usually expect.

 

It is indeed unusual to hear Spem in alium performed with (if my calculations are correct) between five and six voices per part. Whether this is appropriate or not is another matter – most authorities believe the work to have been conceived for eight choirs each comprising five singers – and certainly the sound is decidedly robust, but if one is prepared to put the thoughts of authenticity aside, the results are spine-tinglingly spectacular.

 

Gabriel Jackson, whose 2005 work commemorating Tallis’s quincentenary year opens this disc, describes the pieces included in this programme as ‘pre-echoes and aftershocks’ of Tallis’s monumental, radiantly beautiful Spem in alium for 40 part choir. Yet nowhere in any of these works does technical complexity inhibit musicality or artistic expression. The two other contemporary pieces, Tarik O’Regan’s I sleep but my heart waketh (in a meagre eight parts) and Bo Holten’s In nomine, fit in well with the Renaissance pieces. In fact, the swells of sound in the Deo gracia, attributed to Ockegham, sound the most startlingly modern.

The recorded sound, though, is rather soft-focused, and the middle voices suffer most. So if your main interest is Tallis, try the Magnificat Choir on Linn or, less technically perfect, but full of character and commitment, the 1965 recording by the Choir of Kings College, Cambridge, under David Willcocks on Decca. Overall, though, this is a disc of stunning music beautifully performed.

 

Founded in 1983 and conducted ever since then by Mike Brewer, the National Youth Choir of Great Britain consists of 140 singers, aged between 16 and 22. Though it doesn’t say specifically in the booklet that the release of this disc celebrates the choir’s twenty-fifth anniversary, this sumptuous CD is the best possible way to mark that milestone. 

 

The programme has been intelligently devised to showcase the choir in several examples of multi-part polyphony and the three modern equivalent pieces complement the older music superbly. The music, therefore, is on an elaborate scale, even if the longest piece only lasts for just under eleven minutes.

 

We are accustomed these days to hearing polyphonic music sung by small expert chamber choirs, often one to a part. But just as it would be a pity if the orchestral music of, say, Haydn or Mozart were to disappear from the repertoire of modern symphony orchestras, so this recital proves conclusively that a well-balanced and well prepared large choir can still be completely effective in polyphonic music. Indeed, the very size of the choir adds significantly to the effect produced by much of the music … Wylkynson adds each of his thirteen voices in turn and then takes them away again so that the piece describes a kind of arch form, building up and then back down again, until eventually it unravels into the single strand with which it began … at it’s height the piece seems like the musical equivalent of a beehive. It’s a real tour de force and I would imagine it requires huge concentration on the part of the performers. Here the effect is simply stunning. 

 

The Josquin piece is written in a “mere” twenty-four parts – four 6-voiced canons. Like the Wylkynson this is another teeming choral tapestry. The music makes much use of repetitive patterns but far from that being a limitation the technique invests the music with life and energy. The young singers surmount its challenges superbly. They’re just as successful in the Ockeghem piece, which consists of nine overlapping canons, Gabriel Jackson tells us. That sounds quite simple but the piece is like an aural kaleidoscope and makes a thrilling and intricate effect.

Amidst all this glorious polyphony how do the modern pieces fit in? Well, in a word, they fit in wonderfully. Gabriel Jackson felicitously describes Holten’s music as being “suffused with a gentle luminosity: quiet, static and ecstatic.” For the most part that’s true but there’s a radiant burst of sound at the word “Sanctus” (4:19) which is the aural equivalent of blinding light. This is an absolutely fascinating piece, superbly performed, which is, in Jackson’s words, “a kind of dream of the sixteenth century refracted through the lens of a late 20th-century sensibility and technique.” 

 

Tarik O’Regan’s piece is not so overtly inspired by sixteenth-century polyphony. Though clearly indebted in part to minimalism I think it was an inspired piece of programme planning to juxtapose it with works such as those by Wylkynson, Josquin and Ockeghem. By so doing Mike Brewer demonstrates clearly just how “modern” some of those old masters were and also the lineage of music when contemporary composers are sensitive to tradition, building on it and renewing it through their own work.

 

The third contemporary piece is by Gabriel Jackson himself and its placement at the head of the programme is highly significant since his piece is a conscious homage to Tallis’s great forty-part motet with which the recital concludes. Jackson states that he wanted to write a piece “that was essentially about light.” If I may say so, the result is a luminous success. I’ve heard a number of Jackson’s choral works in the last couple of years and I’ve been greatly impressed by them but this piece strikes me as the finest example of his work that I’ve heard to date.

 

And so to Spem in Alium, which one might almost call the fons et origo of this whole programme. I mean no disrespect to the marvellous music that precedes it on this disc when I say that one senses that everything has been leading up to this pinnacle. Of course, it’s one of the towering achievements of Tudor polyphony, indeed of all polyphony, and Brewer’s young singers seem to be inspired by it to give of their very best. They give a wonderful account of it. The purity of the top soprano lines is especially arresting. In performance the piece can often come across just as a wall of sound. That doesn’t happen here, thanks to the grip that Brewer has on the score. I admire greatly the clarity he brings to the performance and especially I like the way he ensures that in passages such as that between 3:07 and 4:48, where Tallis thins out the textures, the singers observe this accurately, thereby achieving some superb contrasts. The engineers play their part too, reporting the separate choirs splendidly. Quite simply, this is one of the finest accounts of Spem in Alium that I’ve encountered on disc and it crowns this recital as, surely, it was meant to.

 

Everything about this disc is of the highest quality. The standard of performance is superb, as is the recorded sound. Gabriel Jackson’s notes are exemplary and the music is quite wonderful. This magnificent CD ravishes and stimulates the ear in equal measure. Bravo! 

Here is a disc that has everything:  polyphony on the grand scale from the 16th to 17th centuries and the 20th to 21st, sung by the glorious young voices of Mike Brewer’s 140-strong National Youth Choir, coupled with a clear, excellently balanced recording from Delphian.  It opens with Sanctum est verum lumen, Gabriel Jackson’s comparison piece and tribute to Tallis’s Spem in alium (on track 10). In between, this fine lesson in composition continues with works by Wylkynson, Guerrero, des Pres, Victoria, Tarik O’Regan, Anerio, Ockeghem and Bo Holten. Brewer fashions from these talented, young singers a radiant wash of sound that is simply stunning.

January 2009

Patric Stanford

 

Using the full forces of the choir, their performance on this CD of the great forty-part motet Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis is without doubt a glorious experience.

 

The passion of composer Gabriel Jackson for this Tallis masterwork, and an opportunity to realise his ambition to compose a companion piece for the Tallis quincentenary in 2005, produced Sanctum est veum lumen (‘Holy is the true light’) – an Antiphon for the Feast of All Saints which Mike Brewer eagerly adopted for the Youth Choir, fitting admirably his ambitious programme for a multi-part choral recording. Jackson’s piece is a beautifully sympathetic choral work that makes a splendid showpiece for this magnificently well disciplined body of young singers. It is a work that matches Tallis with the same number of parts divided into five choirs and, by coincidence, the same number of four-beat bars. In nomine is a work that treats the big choir to an impressive series of magical and sensitive effects.

 

This well balanced an inspiring recording bears witness to the maintained high standard of choral singing in Britain, the admirable enthusiasm of the young singers, and the remarkable commitment of Mike Brewer, one of the few great British choral animateurs.

La Scena Musicale (Canada) 

December 2008

Norman Lebrecht

 

Gabriel Jackson wrote it – as a contemporary riposte to Thomas Tallis’s 40-part Spem in Alium. Following up with that masterpiece in St Alban-the Martyr, Holborn, the NYC overcome perils of echo to fill the space with great glory. Of all the works on this heartening disc I was most taken with Tarik O’Regan’s I sleep but my heart waketh, a post –minimalist patter song with a Vaughan Williams-like part for soprano solo. Mike Brewer conducts a mellifluous bunch of teens and there’s not one voice out of tune or place.