Sound effects | 17 April 2010

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.