The news that Decca will release a recording of Striggio’s colossal Missa Ecco sì beato giorno on 7 March promises an oxymoronic treat for some of us.
The news that Decca will release a recording of Striggio’s colossal Missa Ecco sì beato giorno on 7 March promises an oxymoronic treat for some of us. There we were, on the stage of the Albert Hall in the 2007 Proms, the new scores in hand, giving the world première of just this piece. A recording was repeatedly discussed at the time, but in the end it was decided that the cost of such an endeavour was too high for the quality of the music. It was thought it would flop.
Now Robert Hollingworth has bitten the bullet and, to celebrate 25 years of his group I Fagiolini, has not only made the first recording of the mass, but also recorded Tallis’s Spem in alium alongside it, in a new way with instruments as well as voices, all in 5.1 surround sound.
It is a very large bullet to bite. Striggio’s mass is scored for 40 voices for most of its length, but goes into 60 for the final ‘Agnus dei’. This makes it by far the biggest piece written up to that time (around 1566) and it probably gave the cue for Tallis to write his 40-part motet Spem in alium: either the mass itself or Striggio’s own 40-part motet Ecce beatam lucem on which the mass seems to be based. Both the mass and this motet were performed together on a European tour Striggio undertook in 1567, bringing them to London as well as to Paris and Vienna. It is thought that Tallis (and the Duke of Norfolk) heard the London performance and decided to rival the scale of it.
The music for the mass disappeared soon after Striggio’s tour, after which it was only known from contemporary written descriptions, and from the survival of Ecce beatam lucem. The hero of its recent rediscovery is Davitt Moroney, the English harpsichordist, who was acute enough to question a miswritten entry in a library catalogue, thereby stumbling upon the missing music. How one conceals the existence of a piece that at its largest requires 60 separate hand-written parts for more than 400 years is a mystery to me, but that is what happened and I have often wondered how Davitt felt when he realised what he had found. Discoveries like that don’t even come once a lifetime. By his own account he then spent a year writing it out and scoring it up.
Not surprisingly, he was reluctant to hand over his discovery cheaply, and insisted on directing an enlarged Tallis Scholars and BBC Singers in the 2007 Prom. No doubt he was asked if he would provide the score for this recording, and no doubt he said no. Unfortunately for his monopoly, however, Robert Hollingworth and Brian Clark decided to begin again, making their own edition and thereby illustrating one of the realities of copyright law — that you can own your transcription of a piece from the past, but not the original material. News that this edition has just been published by the Early Music Company will probably have rubbed salt in the wound.
The Decca disc will include all this 40- (and 60-) part music as well as other motets by Striggio, some of them written to mark big political events of the time. And although Spem in alium, at least, has been recorded many times before (recordings which are often dubbed ‘first-ever’ versions — either because it’s being sung in English, or because it’s being sung at a higher pitch than usual, or because it includes instruments) this disc is said to contain yet more ‘first-evers’. Much of this is justified and I especially thrill to the idea of the recording ‘imaginatively bringing together not just voices but the full gamut of Renaissance instrumental colour (strings, brass, wind and lutes)’.
We should now finally be able to judge the Tallis against its competitors, for there has been a lot of loose talk over the years about how much ‘better’ it is than anything Striggio could manage. Here we will have all the evidence in short order. From my own experience of the 2007 Prom, I can say that Tallis’s Spem is the more complex work in terms of part-writing; but the sheer power of multipart chords, especially when backed up by instruments, has an appeal all of its own. I still remember the frisson caused by the 60 voices of Striggio’s ‘Agnus dei’ first sounding through the Albert Hall that night.
And if you want to hear the whole package live, Martin Randall Tours is hoping to present it in the basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence, on 27 October. This will be a private concert — but why not join the tour and experience the biggest piece of the 16th century (as the blurb might say)?
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