This was the first concert I got to from this year’s Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF).
I don’t normally go to Tallis Scholars concerts. My ideal of Renaissance music is that all the parts are equal and all the performers are performing their own line as the spirit moves them. Magically, if they are all feeling the same beat and moved by the same or similar spirit, it comes out beautiful.
The Tallis Scholars have a different ideal. Their group is very top heavy (more sopranos than basses) and they sing with a conductor, who enforces that all the voices are singing on exactly the same beat. They are consistently one of the top draws at BEMF, and if you aren’t thinking as dogmatically as I do about Renaissance music, they do sound gorgeous. And admittedly, they are less top-heavy than they were the last time I heard them (probably about 30 years ago).
Last night’s concert was billed as a collaboration between the Tallis Scholars and The English cornet and sackbut ensemble, which is a group of virtuoso brass players who play instruments of different timbres without a conductor.
The concert started out as you would expect, with the 10 singers standing in a semicircle and the 6 instrumentalists in a smaller semicircle in front of them and the conductor at the center of the circle. They performed “Omnes de Saba” by Lassus, which lasts about 4 minutes. Then everybody walked off stage and the one stage hand picked up three chairs and walked off with them, rearranged the music stands, picked up the other three charis and walked off with them.
I heard comments around me about what a short concert it was. One fairly loud voiced gentleman commented that the ticket was expensive for that amount of music.
Then the singers came out and sang the rest of the first half with no instruments. At intermission the people I talked to expressed a hope that there would be more brass on the second half.
The singers came out without the instruments for the second half. They rearranged themselves in several configurations, so when the door opened, I kept hoping instruments would come out, but it was so that some of the pieces could be sung with only 8 instead of 10 singers.
They did two pieces with “lamentation” in the title, and one called “Timor et Tremor” (fear and trembling). I was hoping they had decided that brass was better for triumphal music than lamentations (which would have been underestimating the expressive ability of cornetts and sackbuts), but no, they proceded to sing a “Jubilate Deo” by Andrea Gabrielli without the instruments, too. (My experience as a cornetto player is that all top lines by Andrea Gabrielli come out just wonderfully on cornetto.)
Finally, with three pieces to go on the program, the singers went away and the instrumentalists came out. Judging by the warmth of the audience reception of this, I wasn’t the only person who had been waiting eagerly for this development. They played two pieces from their own repertoire, with spectacularly improvised ornamentation from the cornettos. (And no conductor.)
For the last piece, the singers and instrumentalists came out together and stood in a semicircle arranged by voice part, with the singers and the instrumentalists mixed. This was by far the most exciting piece of the evening, and the audience reaction fully justified an encore. They repeated the first piece on the program, since they clearly hadn’t allocated any rehearsal time for learning even the simplest of encore pieces.
If you like the Tallis Scholars, it was a very good Tallis Scholars concert. If you like the cornetts and sackbuts, you have another chance to hear them tomorrow at 10:30 in Emmanuel Church. But I was disappointed that this collaboration concert wasn’t more of a collaboration.
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This was the second concert I went to at this year’s 
LayMusic.org 