Tudor war cries clash with Tallis’s lofty beauty

No festival is complete without a premiere, and last night the Holy Week Festival at St John’s Smith Square offered a very unusual one. The choir Alamire unveiled a piece from the reign of Henry VIII, not heard in London since 1544.

As the personable director of Alamire, David Skinner, reminded us, this was a time when church music was entangled in doctrinal upheavals and power politics. Skinner is a canny operator, as well as a fine musician. He knows we just can’t get enough of Tudor wives and the murky world of palace intrigues they lived in. The

“Wolf Hall effect” has certainly worked well for him. In 2015, he and Alamire released two Tudor-themed albums, one entitled The Spy’s

Choirbook, the other containing pieces from Anne Boleyn’s songbook.

At this concert they performed another piece with political connections that was only discovered in 1978 lurking behind plasterboard at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

See, Lord, and Behold is one of the grandest pieces by Thomas Tallis, the greatest composer of that era. Originally this was a huge six-part sacred piece in praise of the Virgin, but in 1544 Henry VIII needed to stir up patriotic feelings, as he was fighting wars on two fronts. His wife Katherine Parr – clearly no coward – kitted out Tallis’s piece with a vengeful new text. “Cast them down hedlonge,” she raged against her husband’s enemies. “For they are treatours and raybels agaynst me.”

It looks stirring stuff on paper. In this performance, finely sung by the choir, it proved to be a bit of a damp squib. In musical terms the piece is one of Tallis’s greatest. It has a kaleidoscopic variety of vocal combinations, and long traceries of counterpoints, each line buoying up its neighbour like the arches in a cathedral. The problem was that the music’s lofty, otherworldly beauty felt completely out of synch with the angry words. It was an opportunistic purloining of a sacred piece for a political situation which has long gone.

Fortunately, the real heart of this concert lay elsewhere. It was devoted entirely to Tallis, and in Skinner’s carefully chosen programme his towering stature as one of the great composers of the era seemed clearer than ever. The variety of sound in the Catholic, Latin pieces in the first half was astonishing and deeply expressive. In the famous O Nata Lux

(O Light Born of Light) there was a lovely example of the “wrong-note” quality in Tallis’s harmony. Skinner and the choir relished it in a way that was just this side of self-indulgent – rightly so, as these ear-bending moments have a paradoxical power to magnify the music’s otherworldly radiance.

Not everything about the performances was spot on. The choir has some powerful basses among the singers, and the sound sometimes seemed bottom-heavy. And in the concert’s second half, devoted to the English, Protestant side of Tallis’s music, the long Litany seemed flinty and unvaried, compared with the compassionate, intimate performance it received from Gallicantus at the Wigmore Hall some weeks ago. But at their best, as in the delicately intricate

In pace in idipsum, the choir sang with a wonderful combination of rhythmic energy and contemplative radiance.