Polyphony and premieres: Tallis Scholars celebrate 40 years

Caroline Gill meets the directors behind the ensemble, ahead of their anniversary concert

The Tallis Scholars: Renaissance radio stars (photo: Eric Richmond)

Peter Phillips and Eric Whitacre discuss the new anniversary work (photo: Clive Barda)

'The committee' - Peter Phillips and Steve Smith

‘You talk’, says Steve Smith, managing director of the Tallis Scholars' record label, Gimell, as I sit down at his kitchen table with Tallis Scholars director Peter Phillips. ‘I’m just going to put my bread in the oven’.

It’s not very rock ‘n roll, admittedly, but that doesn’t mean that Phillips and Smith aren’t rock stars in their own way. They have been at the top of the early music tree for 40 years this year – an achievement no other early music group has so far managed to achieve – and although they may not be known for trashing hotel rooms or driving Rolls Royces into swimming pools, there probably isn’t a (classical) music enthusiast around that hasn’t heard of them. They have recorded nearly 70 discs and performed 1800 concerts since Phillips first arrived at university and pulled together a group of friends to sing a type of music he had started to enjoy at school. Although the personnel has undergone some fundamental changes, during those years it has nevertheless experienced an evolution and refinement that has seen its identity stay fundamentally the same as the one they are now preparing to celebrate through the release of ‘Renaissance Radio’ (a disc that provides a fascinating overview of their achievements – it can jump forward 28 years between two adjacent tracks, and then back almost as far again), and a grand concert in St Paul’s Cathedral in March that will include special commissions by Gabriel Jackson and Eric Whitacre.  

It’s a lifetime of achievement already, and one that has seen the performance and recording of Renaissance polyphony move its position from ‘specialist’ interest to an appeal that is so widespread that even novels considered slightly dubious in some quarters have the power to propel one of their discs to the top of the classical charts. The appearance of Tallis’s Spem in alium in the blockbusting Fifty Shades of Grey is an elephant in the room for most of our discussion until we finally have a giggle about it, with Phillips saying ‘I don’t mind – it’s still the same music’.  It is, however, a good illustration of how firmly embedded in the 21st Century have the Tallis Scholars not only become, but how much they are aware they need to be.

‘Our main concern is declining CD sales – far more than anyone had anticipated’, says Smith. ‘And not just for us. The BPI [British Phonographic Industry] figures are out there.’

But are there positives to be found in the new download culture?

‘We benefit from it, yes,’ agrees Smith. ‘iTunes is our biggest customer. It’s just that the decline in CD sales is not being matched by a corresponding increase in downloads. The trend is now away from buying a new album to experiment and see if you like it, saying “I spent that money, I didn’t like it, but I don’t mind”.  The world has changed, and there’s nothing we can do about it but, for instance, there was recently a programme about Spem on Radio 4: it was clearly our recording they were using, and all the shops sold out the next day, not restocking for a week. iTunes just kept on selling.’ 

Unsurprisingly, then, ‘mainstream’ is not a word that makes Phillips blanch as it does many musicians whose interest in their area is as much academic as aesthetic (Phillips is joint director of music at Merton College, Oxford, as well as being a prolific music writer and journalist). Does it surprise – or even delight – him that music has become as widely enjoyed as it has?

‘What pleases me,’ says Phillips, ‘is the international reach of it. It shows that this music is now wanted as much as a symphony is wanted around the world.’

But does he think the sound or personality of the group has changed over the years he has been working with it?

‘Well, I never wanted it to change,’ he says. ‘I got a sound in my head very early on from the Clerks of Oxenford, whose sound I fell in love with. I remember the process very vividly – it happened within the space of a very short time in 1972, my first term at university: I had already conducted a little bit of polyphony at school, and I went to hear this famous group. They sang Tallis’s Gaude Gloriosa, which could never rival anything I had done at school, and I was completely bowled over by it. I think what I’ve tried to do every time I’ve conducted the Tallis Scholars is get that sound back.’ (Article continues below)

The Clerks are now long gone, and although they didn’t necessarily provide the prototype, they undoubtedly cast long shadows over all the groups that have grown out of the Oxbridge choral tradition since. The Tallis Scholars are different, though – their influence can be seen and heard in most groups that sprang up in England in the 1980s and '90s, and they have garnered a loyal following that has often polarised critics and audiences. I want to ask Smith and Phillips about this: it’s always very interesting to hear how conductors feel about how they are perceived.  But it turns out to be the wrong sort of question to ask Phillips or Smith, because neither of them will enter into any sort of comparisons with other groups.  Phillips chuckles, though, when he mentions that in the '90s the Tallis Scholars were referred to by critics as ‘sexless’, and that one of his favourite comments was by a French newspaper in the 1980s that called them ‘monotone, et ennuyeux’.

‘They’ve got to do better than that now, though,’ he says. ‘That’s no longer an acceptable thing to say about us. But we still don’t have all the answers: we don’t know how we’re going to tap into this supply that’s still there. The Renaissance repertoire is huge.’

It’s fair to say, though, that with the information they do gather from public opinion, they make wise-minded decisions about what is right for the group’s identity. Perhaps this is how they have weathered 40 years, instead of the traditional 25 or so, when many early music ensembles have tended to reach the end of their own particular journeys?

‘I could give you several examples of groups like that,’ says Phillips, counting off the reasons on his fingers. ‘They do something important, musically, have fantastic repertoire, a terrific team, but then something goes wrong. They run out of repertoire, they fall out with themselves, or just run out of the music that defines them. That all could have happened to us but we were never going to run out of music because we spread our net very wide within our speciality.’

Yes, but some groups can still survive on the basis of re-issues and the re-hashing of the same repertoire. The difference has been that there are very few Tallis Scholars compilations, and very little repetition of repertoire.

‘Well, we try to avoid fads,’ muses Phillips, ‘We set out right from the beginning to do the whole of the Renaissance in a classical idiom that we hoped would survive that. I didn’t see any reason to spoof it up. We could have made it more entertaining, with all that olde worlde stuff like monkish habits and candles, but I couldn’t see why we shouldn’t stand on a concert stage in an international artists series in a symphony hall without doing anything except deliver it.’

That’s not to say that this is not nevertheless a particularly scholarly area of music performance. Often something of such simple crystalline beauty as Renaissance polyphony requires more finessing than music of more complicated, unsubtle effects and grander scale. With all the unfussy excellence that the Tallis Scholars seek to create, it would be interesting to know how they marry all that academic research and careful honing of issues of performance practice with their high-profile success on the concert platform.

‘I don’t worry about it too much,’ says Phillips, simply. ‘I’ve done the research: I’ve looked into what people think the sound was like in those days and I’ve applied common-sense answers to what I think it was likely to have been like. Do I think we have reached the standards obtained in the 16th Century? Absolutely not. I mean, we’re standing there for us, the performance and the audience in the present. But there’s a subtle limit to how far you can go away from what was likely to have been authentic.’

Authenticity is unlikely to be an issue at the Tallis Scholars’ 40th Anniversary concert at St Paul’s Cathedral on March 7: the programme will include new commissions for the occasion by Gabriel Jackson and Eric Whitacre, as well as more familiar Tallis Scholars repertoire, and Spem in alium, for obvious numerical reasons.

And there’s the celebration disc. The concept of ‘Renaissance Radio’ is Smith’s, borne of his conviction that there is more to be achieved in terms of reaching as wide an audience as possible with the music he and Phillips love so much. ‘I wanted to make it easier for radio stations to play our music,’ he says. ‘I want to be able to say: “these are pieces people thoroughly enjoy, in a format that is easier for you to programme.” It’s about making some of the stuff we’ve done easier to find.’

And to put together your Greatest Hits, too.
 
‘Absolutely. What is true, I think, is that I know our catalogue better than any other label manager because I’ve recorded every note of it. So when you’re looking to put together The Best Of, it’s very obvious to me what is the Best Of. And you can choose to put it together without going through endless committees.’

‘We are the committee!’ says Phillips.

‘What, you and Steve, these coffee mugs and this kitchen table?’

‘Yes!’ they both laugh.

‘And it works very well that way,’ adds Smith. ‘We do have our arguments-cum-discussions very occasionally but we know exactly where we’re heading, and the most important thing is to keep it alive and help it grow.’

The Tallis Scholars' 40th Anniversary Concert, featuring premieres of works by Gabriel Jackson and Eric Whitacre, is at St Paul's Cathedral on March 7, 7.30pm