Chicago Classical Review

There are Christmas musical traditions tied to popular tastes and unabashedly commercial considerations. Then there is a centuries-older tradition, based on Gregorian chant, that embodies the religious beliefs and churchly practice central to the Christian observance of Jesus’ birth.

The timeless spiritual power of the latter was the holiday gift brought by The Tallis Scholars to their very belated downtown Chicago concert debut Monday evening at St. James Cathedral.

For some 1,000 years, chant was the most traditional way to celebrate Christmas, as Peter Phillips, the British-based vocal ensemble’s founder and director, observed in his program note. The concert by his ten singers traversed no fewer than nine centuries of chant-derived sacred music, from the 12^th-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen to the 20^th century Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s reimagining of the tradition.

Esoteric though this repertory may be, you would have to look far and wide to hear it interpreted with such immense authority as the Scholars bring to it.

In the resonant yet clear acoustics of St. James, their sound resonated with a smoothness of blend, purity of intonation and lucidity of line that have been a hallmark of the Tallis sound and style since its founding in 1973 as one of the pioneering ensembles of the early music movement.

This has remained true over the hundreds of changes in personnel the group has undergone since then, as their many recordings attest.

Phillips and friends grouped their varied program around four different settings of the medieval antiphon Salve Regina and two versions of the popular carol, also from the Middle Ages, In dulci jubilo, augmented by prime examples of sacred polyphony, sung in Latin, reflecting the living Gregorian tradition.

Of prime interest were masterpieces by the Dutch polyphonist Jacob Obrecht, the Italian Renaissance composer Giovanni Palestrina and the Spaniard Tomas Luis de Victoria. It was here that the chamber choir’s ethereal beauty of sound and control of long phrases came particularly to the fore.

In Obrecht’s setting of Salve Regina the extra care Phillips took to balancing shifts of texture heightened the expressive effect. Palestrina’s version of the same text and his brief motet Ut queant laxis brought a sense of serenely dovetailed polyphony floating in a sacred space. A fascinating example of sacred polyphony from New Spain was the little-known composer Hernando Franco’s Salve Regina, with its lovely imitative writing.

For Victoria’s Magnificat Phillips divided his singers into antiphonal choirs, with precision-tooled exchanges of plain-chant motifs passing between the voices.

Pärt’s very different treatment of the Magnificat text finds highly expressive use of the contrast between consonant and dissonant harmonic elements, all to draw out the majesty and wonder of words describing the Virgin Mary’s joy on receiving the news that she is to bear the Christ. The Estonian master’s fervent Da pacem, Domine made a welcome inclusion.

The austere monody (single, unaccompanied vocal lines) of three sacred pieces by Hildegard has the composer literally rising above the narrow compass of liturgical plainchant, the soprano voices ecstatically extolling the virtues of the Holy Spirit.

The 19^th-century English composer Robert Pearsall’s madrigal-esque rendition of In dulci jubilo concluded the program on a suitably joyous note.

Apollo’s Fire performs Handel’s Messiah at St. James Cathedral 4:30 p.m. Dec. 15. 

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