Tallis in performance

In 1956 the first long-playing record devoted to the music of Thomas Tallis was issued by the American record company Vanguard.¹ It included five hymns and the Lamentations: 'Magnificent music, beautifully sung, finely recorded', was one distinguished and exacting English critic's opinion. He thought that the artists sang 'with real style and conviction'.² An American critic thought the performances 'little short of perfection'.³ Fifteen years later, on a reissue of the disc, a reviewer considered that the singers were 'in superb form, singing so beautifully in tune that they still make other groups sound comparatively coarse'.⁴ This was a group of five solo men's voices, with a soprano, Eileen McLoughlin, joining them in the hymns. One of the critics conceded that if 'authenticity' were to have been maintained, a small group of boys should have sung that top line in the hymns, with their 'more objective quality'.⁵ But another was quick to reassure prospective purchasers that, though indeed it was a soprano who sang the top line, 'Happily it is a straight line and not an operatic or wobbly one.'⁶ The singers were members of the Deller Consort, who clearly derived stylistic essentials from the sound and performing style of the English cathedral choir. Alfred Deller, after all, had been a lay clerk at Canterbury Cathedral. When this recording was made he was still a vicar choral at St Paul's, as was Maurice Bevan; Gerald English, the tenor of the Consort, had sung in that choir too.

When the cathedral choirs themselves recorded music by Tallis in the 1950s their performances had generally been found wanting. In a 1953 recording of Tallis's first Salvator mundi setting the boys of Canterbury Cathedral 'hardly seem to know which note they are to begin with', one critic fumed. The harmonic clashes were stressed most unmusically, he thought: 'There is a point beyond which even anguish becomes vulgar.' Even though the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, acquitted themselves well in a recording of the 'magnificent' Te Deum of Tallis, he hoped that if there were to be any more recordings of English cathedral music, it should only be with a kind of Philharmonia Cathedral Choir, one formed exclusively of the best singers from all over England.⁷

There were indeed good cathedral and college choirs in England in the middle of the 20th century, but the overall standard was considered low. Cathedral choirs did make a handful of recordings in the first half of the 20th century, but included not a single work by Thomas Tallis. In fact only a tiny handful of his works were regularly sung by these choirs. A dozen works by Tallis had been published by Oxford University Press in the Tudor Church Music series of octavo leaflets before the Second World War, but few cathedral choirs sang more than one or two of these. Most of Tallis's music was written for pre-Reformation liturgies after all, and 50 years ago many cathedral deans would not permit anthems to be sung in Latin, let alone mass settings.

So in the 1950s, when more and more performances of an increasing number of works by Tallis were heard on the BBC Third Programme and on disc, they were not generally given by cathedral choirs. But besides the voices of the Deller Consort there were a number of 'secular'-concert-giving-choirs, who began making records of Renaissance polyphony. In 1944 a small group of young enthusiasts had formed the Renaissance Society. They were discontented with what they saw as the low standard of church music that prevailed almost everywhere, and disliked the insipid and sentimental quality of much music that was widely performed in churches and cathedrals. They wanted to re-awaken interest in Renaissance polyphony and in plainsong-not from a doctrinal, doctrinaire or theological point of view but from a conviction of this music's supreme beauty and fitness for church use. They were concerned too with what they judged the low standards of performance by the choirs in churches and cathedrals, and so formed a choir, the...