How often do any of us get the chance to hear a 40-voice Renaissance motet performed live? The famous one, too, Spem in alium by the English composer Thomas Tallis (1505-1585). And how often does this one piece (performed twice) become the entire program, particularly since it's about 10 minutes long? The answer, thanks to Make Music New York and The Dessoff Choirs, was late afternoon Monday a week ago at the R.C. Church of St. Andrew in lower New York. It brought to an end a day of music that had begun for Nora and me at noon with an all-Xenakis program by the Yale Percussion Group in the Naumberg Bandshell in Central Park. A perfect location for a stunning performance.
The motet, however, is the event that lingers in memory. For eight choirs of five voices each (yes, 40 separate vocal lines), Spem in alium was written sometime around 1570. Today it's one of the pinnacles of Renaissance polyphony. In the performance Nora and I heard, the eight choirs (conducted by Michel Galante) surrounded the audience with the individual vocal parts crossing, crisscrossing, and circling in spectacularly unexpected ways, complete with echoing choirs and solo voices answering from everywhere. It was, as the program said, "a tour de force, for the composer and singers alike.” Thomas Tallis, incidentally, who lived to be 80 years old, wrote mostly church music for the Tudor monarchs, all the way from Henry VII to the last Queen Elizabeth I. You could just hear the finesse and control he had over these 40 lines, written as they were when he was 65.