Fatma Said
The Egyptian soprano’s dazzling debut album enjoys a double triumph!
In an increasingly secular age, a recording of Mass settings composed over 500 years ago might not have seemed an immediate front runner for a Recording of the Year. But Peter Phillips isn’t complaining. His Tallis Scholars have been purveyors of choral excellence for nearly half-a-century now and, he says, it’s easy to get taken for granted. ‘People sometimes assume that your best work comes early on, so this award is actually very meaningful. Josquin gets a boost (not that he needs one!), and what could be more appropriate in the year that marks the 500th anniversary of his death?’ It also brings a series some 34 years in the making full circle. Volume One was a Gramophone Record of the Year in 1987 and Josquin, a composer addicted to intricate patterns and symmetries, would surely have relished the circularity.
Not that Phillips set out to record the complete Masses – he’s always been a bit ‘iffy’ about completist projects. ‘When we started they were all the rage, but the problem so often is that not all the music is worth doing, and you can’t afford a duff record, especially when the resources might have been put into something more deserving. As it turned out, though, the quality of Josquin’s Mass settings is consistently high, and with just 18 of them, a comprehensive set seemed eminently doable – potentially career defining even. Like many groups, we’d plundered the High Renaissance. I was turned on to Tallis; Gibbons was a favourite; and when we reached Palestrina I gawped! But having made that first Josquin recording I just fell in love with his music.’
The headlining work on the current award-winner is a Mass with the name of Josquin’s then employer all over it.
Literally. Out of the vowels comprising the name and title of Ercole d’este, Josquin fashioned a musical cypher that sounds out proudly no fewer than 47 times. Then again, whether playing with musical mirrors or indulging in esoteric numerology, like JS Bach after him, Josquin was quite the connoisseur of compositional artifice. Was expressivity equally high on his agenda? ‘Well we’re not talking romantic expression,’ replies Phillips. ‘For musicians like Josquin, the way to God was through a perfection of numerical and astronomical elements
– a music of the spheres. The result is undeniably expressive but expressive without the baggage of later connotations of the word.’
And that fits neatly with Phillips’s own aesthetic. In a project spanning over three decades you might expect a subtle change of performance perspective along the way. Not for Phillips. ‘I was always trying to capture an ideal sound that had been in my head from the age of 18; a vision of beauty. And over time we’ve got nearer and nearer to that ideal. I wanted to create an instrument made up of human voices; one I could play and make great music on while respecting what’s on the page. It’s a kind of ultimate authenticity.’
Josquin, he declares somewhat mischievously, was a Renaissance ‘superstar’. ‘Forever in the limelight, he could write as the mood took him, and charge whatever he liked. He was an allround shrewd operator who was always jetting off, especially to Italy where they couldn’t get enough of him.’
A good fit, then, for The Tallis Scholars, once described by The New York Times as ‘the rock stars of Renaissance vocal music’. Philips is sad to have reached journey’s end. ‘It’s been so rewarding; a wonderful path to have taken, but I’m always looking to move on. I can’t wait to get back to some of those Franco-flemish composers who need championing – people like Gombert and Clemens non Papa. It’s where the spotlight needs to fall now. There’s a great treasure trove of under-nurtured stuff out there. We’re just lucky enough to be able to lift the lid.’
Turn the page to discover the winners of all this year’s BBC Music Magazine awards
‘The quality of Josquin’s Masses is consistently high’