I don’t know when I’ve been more moved: Ora Singers at Tate Modern reviewed

It’s the breath I miss most. The moment when a shuffling group of men and women in scruffy concert blacks breathe in as one and become an ensemble. Now that our breath is diseased, shrunk from, masked, now that performances are digitally distanced and filtered, smoothed and flattened out on screens, there’s something dangerously poignant about that physical swell of inhalation and exhalation that sets the air in motion at the front of a concert hall.

Which is why, when I heard that 40 singers would be coming together in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall to sing Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium, I twitched with need to be there.

We talk a lot about size with Spem (and not just since it made a cameo appearance in Christian Grey’s Red Room of Pain in Fifty Shades of Grey), get hung up on the 40 parts that make it one of the biggest works of its kind. But, as Grey would argue, it’s what you do with it that counts. Spem isn’t about a monolithic wall of sound, it’s about the movement of sound through space — three-dimensional music.

Eight choirs of five voices fan out in a horseshoe allowing an audience to follow melodies as they move gradually around the room from Choir I to Choir VIII and back again. It’s 16th-century surround sound: renaissance architecture as intricate and magnificent as Nonsuch Palace, where it was probably performed, but which lives only in the moment of its creation, built out of breath and air.

In the end I couldn’t be there; no one could. The Tate’s hyper-vigilance (if you can’t social distance in the Turbine Hall, where can you?) banished the audience to our laptops.