The Tallis Scholars’ 50th concert in New York City — the first was in 1988 — took place in St Bartholomew’s Church, Park Avenue, on 26 March.
The Tallis Scholars’ 50th concert in New York City — the first was in 1988 — took place in St Bartholomew’s Church, Park Avenue, on 26 March. Since we have sung now in 15 different spaces in NYC — more than in any other city in the world and including the Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — this was an unusual choice of venue for a celebration. St Bart’s is famous for a number of things, but since reverberant acoustics is not one of them I feared we would have an uphill task appealing to a new audience.
One of the things St Bart’s is properly famous for is hosting the largest organ in New York, and the tenth largest in the world. (The size of organs, like the batting averages of leading cricketers, has a mysterious appeal for a very special kind of anorak. It’s almost sexual.) This instrument has five manuals and rank upon rank of stops to match. Why any player needs all that firepower beats me; and some of it seems redundant — the fifth manual appears almost apologetic, smaller and tilted above the other four, unsure of its status. One of the first musicians to be employed at St Bart’s — the blurb says he was ‘brought from Europe by St Bart’s’ — was Leopold Stokowski, who was known to enjoy the odd fortissimo in his music-making. However, on the occasion of our concert, the current incumbent, William Trafka, launched the evening with Robert Gower’s arrangement of the Fanfare from Dukas’s one-act ballet La Péri. He played it beautifully — and there really are times when reverberation would be one thing too many.
St Bart’s was the church where, in the 1981 film Arthur, Arthur’s (Dudley Moore) wedding to Susan Johnson (Jill Eikenberry) was due to take place. Less happily, it was also the church that became the subject of a much-publicised case concerning air rights in the New York real-estate market, which clashed directly with issues of historical preservation. The parishioners wanted to replace the community house and open terrace with a speculative high-rise commercial structure that would boost the parish’s depleted funds. Eventually, the Landmarks Preservation Commission turned down their plans for a 59-storey office building, the case having snowballed into a national debate about whether churches and religious buildings should be exempt from historic ordinances. The parishioners came over as being greedy; and as a result New York is studded with churches like St Bart’s, which a hundred years ago seemed tall, with inspiring cupolas and towers, but which now are so overshadowed by immense structures that it is difficult to see them at all.
Making a full choral sound in a very dry building is a technical challenge which can be met by choosing the repertoire carefully. As usual, I didn’t quite do this. My way of planning a tour is to think of a composer I would like to put forward, and then form a sequence of pieces around a central ‘great work’. This is very often a mass setting, and the composer is very often Flemish. This time it was the turn of Jean Mouton, whose Missa Dicte moy toutes voz pensees had attracted my attention, as I sat in the Senate House library leafing through his complete works, by virtue of having a second Agnus that is scored for three solo basses.
I thought any composer who could dare to write a whole movement for such a sonority must be worth a punt, and so it was that many months later we found ourselves standing in front of a thousand people in a dry space, hoping against hope that Mouton’s sonorities would save us. Mouton, incidentally, was probably in charge of the French chapelle royale at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, when Francis I and Henry VIII did battle in a number of different fields of human endeavour, including Church music, and so it was probably Mouton who indirectly did battle with William Cornysh, who was leading the English Chapel Royal choir. That contest, led by two such luminaries, would get my vote for the most important unavailable recording from the past.
Some pieces of music carry their own acoustic within them, and so can be sung more or less anywhere with impunity; others, like Allegri’s Miserere, rely completely on the building where they are to be heard. Fortunately for us, Mouton’s music largely falls into the former category, even though this particular mass setting is essentially in four parts, lacking a soprano. When a New York Times reviewer later referred to our ‘voices swelling with soulful precision in the church’s resonant acoustics’, I knew my punt had come good. Is there any end to the depth and subtlety of the Flemish masters?
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