From Keith Fraser:
Spem in the Quad, Worcester College Oxford
It’s not often you get the opportunity to perform Tallis’ masterpiece “Spem in Allium” at all these days, let alone in the quad of Worcester College Oxford with a group of music students dedicated to performing works such as this for the sheer fun of it. I was delighted then to be invited to join Christopher Ku in this particular performance on Friday 28th October.
I have to confess, I have a wonderful recording of the Spem in Allium by Jeremy Summerly’s Oxford Camarata and have even listened to it on occasion. It’s one of those ironies, I suppose, that anyone with an interest in early music will be familiar with Tallis’ motet for 40 voices but like many I’d never even picked up a score let alone actually sung it. Arriving an hour before the performance (which included a Lassus madrigal and Holst’s Nunc Dimittis which was commissioned by R R Terry for Westminster Cathedral in 1914 and was for many years lost) the notion of singing one per part in a piece of music that can at times appear fiendishly difficult was a bit daunting, but as we got into it, the composition did actually start to make some sense.
I don’t know if it is an urban myth that Tallis composed the piece as a bet or a dare after hearing of a 40 part motet written by Alessandro Striggio to outdo him, but somehow I could almost believe that. It has also been suggested that the piece was composed to honour Elizabeth’s 40th birthday, but I expect any canny composer would dedicate a piece to the monarch to ensure publication and patronage. Either way, I’m glad he did write it. The piece itself spans about 10 minutes and is written for 8 choirs of 5 voices (SATBB) and the grandeur of the scale allows for moments of imitative counterpoint, homophony, dialogue between the choirs, rhetorical text-setting, and bold harmonic changes. Tallis himself would have likely considered it a significant achievement because musically he signed his name within it. The very length of the piece is a cryptogram for his name: 69 Longs (a “long” being two breves) being the same value as “Tallis” when the letters in the Latin alphabet are converted to numbers and added (19+1+11+11+9+18).
It is believed that the first performance of the Spem took place at a dinner party in the octagonal banqueting house of Nonsuch Place where half of the performers would have stood on the ground level surrounding the guests while the other half would have sung from the first floor gallery overlooking the hall creating a revolving pillar of sound. The logistics of the quadrangle at Worcester didn’t quite allow for that (the gardeners refused to allow anyone to stand on the grass precluding us singing from under the cloister) and so we had to make do with an arrangement whereby the choirs were stood at the top of the cloister steps and the audience around the quad. It worked, though not helped by a bracing October wind that at times could be quite loud, but which also carried the sound into ever corner. It was, for me at least, a wonderful experience that I would hope to repeat and I would encourage anyone thinking of embarking on a Spem project to do so with gusto. Tallis would most definitely have approved!
I don't know Jeremy Summerly’s Oxford Camarata version, and now I'm itching to buy it! The versions on CD that I have all fail in the sound engineering. The work, with its 40 parts, starts sounding like a traffic jam, not quite the traffic jam at the end of Mahler's 2nd, but a traffic jam all the same. In one version that I have, the music actually becomes distorted. Perhaps if I had a fifty thousand dollar stereo system these versions might not sound so bad.
So I envy your chance to hear Spem unmediated.
The other problem with recordings of Spem is the inability to capture the sound image and sound stage of being surrounded with singers. Most music is performed in front of an audience, and stereo tries to reproduce this. Yet other kinds of music are performed not in front of the audience but around the audience. The audience is in the music, not before it. With surround sound one would think this being-in-the-music could now be reproduced. The whole Venetian School awaits this kind of reproduction.
isn't the recording used in the video clip above actually the Tallis Scholars' recording from the early 80s?
I got to do Spem once, with the Case Western Collegium. There weren't enough voices in the Early Music singers, so they drafted all available early instrumentalists (incl. me) to cover parts. Synchronization was a bit rough-and-ready, but it actually worked fairly well with the instruments.
Clearly, we need a "flash Spem" in some resonant public space.