Record Review - Tallis Scholars and Stephen Isserlis/John Tavener

 The Tallis Scholars, Josquin Masses (Gimell); John Tavener, No Longer Mourn for Me, Stephen Isserlis at al (Hyperion)

The Tallis Scholars come to the end of their 34-year cycle of the masses of Josquin Desprez with the ninth such disc. Not that it began with any ambitions to be so.

It might now seem as if Josquin was the pre-eminent composer of his age (late C15th-early  C16th) on the back of the efforts of Peter Phillips and his select group of singers but he was among the stars of his generation at the time, too. Exactly what he heard is hard for us to know and the likes of Bach are known to have been dissatisfied at times with the standard of musician they had to deal with but Titian is known for a blue like no other blue and Renaissance wine might well have tasted better than the supermarket plonk we tolerate so abjectly these days and so there's no reason to think he didn't hear his own music in the Tallis Scholars's chosen style of purity and clarity. And authenticity's a dubious virtue to claim or assign anyway.

Connoisseurs will no doubt be satisfied with no less than all nine Scholars/Josquin discs whereas such depth in numbers would be wasted on me and I have non-Josquin Scholars records as well as Josquin by other groups. In retrospect, I wonder if Peter might have called his project the Josquin Scholars.

The non-connoisseur might find it difficult to differentiate between many of the masses but to Peter's finely-tuned ear, they are all unique. The Missa Hercules Dux Ferrarie, with the composer keen to impress his employer, uses the Duke's repeated name as the basis for the first mass here. On much of the disc, as in the Sanctus & Benedictus, the notes are taken at a lively enough pace, there probably being no metronome markings to go by but the Agnus Dei is gentle and cool. Maybe I take my bearings from the colossal, if brief, Deploration sur la Mort de Johannes Ockeghem, which will be first on my list when I select the music for any invitation to appear on Private Passions but I often think music is taken if anything more quickly than it might be.

The Missa del aultre amer is an oddity in being comparative short and not expansive when expansion is something that Josquin does as well as Handel does embellishment. It is again fleet-footed in places with a certain lightness of touch and the interest is often in the shifting techtonic plates of the tenor or bass lines, as I so often find I'm following in Bach cantatas.

The Missa Faysant regretz shows no sign of being a precursor of Miss Otis Regrets but if you think that's an inappropriate and irreverent comment, wait for the Tavener review in a minute. I'm sure it's not right to find pre-echoes of baroque style in this polyphony but I often do, as in the 'Amen' of the Credo. It finishes with a spare Agnus Dei and, unlike a lot of Beethoven, doesn't insist on a climactic ending but is calm and restrained with a fitting sense of completion.

Very differently religious and 500 years later, the music of John Tavener seems to need to be more intense to insist on its spiritual essence in an age that no longer takes such texts as given truths.

This album, put together by Stephen Isserlis, who was a friend of the composer, also brings in a wider range of cultural influences than slightly different versions of the mass.

Preces and Responses, arranged by Stephen for eight cellos, is a rich exposition of themes that might loosely be taken for the early C20th English pastoral and we might wish for more of the same but there is much darker and more mysterious territory to explore before they reconvene for the finale.

The death of Ivan Ilyich, based on Tolstoy, which might be as close to religion as many get by now, is not a 27 minutes I'm likely to repeat often. It takes a long time for the agonies of a dying man, sung in the bass by Matthew Rose, to imagine it sees some light. It makes much of Arvo Part sound like Showaddywaddy - and I did say there was more irreverence to come - but there are a lot of records to choose from on the shelves and 27 minutes can be made to seem much longer when music takes us to the edge like this does. 

Mahámátar, featuring the Sufi singer, Abi Sampa, who appeared on The Voice in 2013, could hardly thus be much more multi-denominational. It is an invocation that one must allow to do its work as it builds, not necessarily in tension or volume, but by amassing its mysterious message. I'm in two minds as to whether it convinces of any spiritual truth or if, ultimately, it sounds like the bewailing of the lack of any.

Popule Meus isn't quite here how I remembered if from Natalie Clein's performance in the Cadogan Hall prom in 2011 when it turned out that John Tavener himself was sitting somewhere up behind me to my left when he came out and took a bow at the end. I don't remember the timpani being quite so thunderous in the live performance and the subdued cello line emerged from the chaos more 'organically'. The text is, 'Oh, my people, What have I done', which at least shows the continuing relevance of old scriptures to recent politics. The cello is my favourite instrument and many of my favourite musicians are cellists, which doesn't make me an expert, but the sensitivity of Stephen's playing on Tavener's sustained lines on this compensate for any imbalance I imagine for myself between what I heard live once nine 9 years ago and what one of the composer's great interpreters sees fit to put on record now. 

The final religion to be covered on the album is Shakespeare with the title track being a restrained 4.26 of a sonnet setting. It is lush, it is plaintive and another laudible quiet ending. There ought to be more of those. It's amazing how much better it leaves you feeling. A soft landing is often preferable to an explosion.