Delight in the music of the Tallis Scholars in a concert celebrating spring and the natural world.
Program note from the Tallis Scholars
The program “Glorious Creatures” is formed around how nature beautifies our lives, from the sun in the sky to the flowers that grow in our gardens. By extension we include the grapes that make the vinum bonum we enjoy. The title is taken from a substantial new setting of words by Thomas Traherne, commissioned by the Tallis Scholars from Nico Muhly.
Some of these pieces (like de Rore's Descendi in hortum meum) involve canon, which is the musical equivalent of the kind of artifice we may associate with horticulture. To draw both strands together we end with a grandly canonic setting of the Magnificat by the Spanish master Sebastián de Vivanco, whose setting of a text from the Song of Songs opens our performance.
Program
Sebastián de Vivanco (1551-1622)
Sicut lilium
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594)
Sicut lilium II
Nico Muhly (b. 1981)
Marrow
Orlando di Lasso (1530/32-1594)
Vinum bonum
Missa Vinum bonum
Muhly
A Glorious Creature
Cipriano de Rore (d. 1565)
Descendi in hortum meum
John Dunstable (1390-1453)
Descendi in hortum meum
Palestrina
Descendi in hortum meum
Vivanco
Magnificat Octavi toni (a 8)
Program subject to change.
About the Tallis Scholars
Since 1973, the Tallis Scholars have performed over 2,500 concerts and released over 60 recordings to become an international leader in Renaissance sacred music. The group’s founder and director Peter Phillips created the ensemble’s trademark sound that reflects the period’s repertoire and for which the Tallis Scholars have become so widely renowned. Recent season highlights include performances in the US, the UK, Japan, France, Germany, and Finland.
Recordings by the Tallis Scholars have received Gramophone magazine’s 1987 Record of the Year Award, two Diapason d'Or de l'Année Awards, and Gramophone’s 1991 Early Music Award. They were nominated for Grammy Awards in 2001, 2009, 2010, and 2013, and inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame by public vote. Their 2020 album marked the last of nine recordings of masses by Josquin des Prez released before the 500th anniversary of the composer’s death. In 2021, they won the BBC Music Magazine’s Recording of the Year Award and the Gramophone Early Music Award.
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Peter Phillips, photo © Peter Adamik
About Peter Phillips
Conductor and writer Peter Phillips has dedicated his career to researching and performing Renaissance polyphony and perfecting the choral sound. Since founding the Tallis Scholars in 1973, he has established Renaissance sacred vocal music as one of the great repertoires of Western classical music.
Phillips also conducts other specialist ensembles, such as the BBC Singers, Netherlands Chamber Choir, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Intrada (Moscow), and El León de Oro (Spain). He is patron of the Chapel Choir of Merton College, Oxford. In 2005, Phillips was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture; helped found the chapel choir of Merton College, Oxford, in 2008, where he is a Bodley Fellow; and was elected an honorary fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, in 2021.
