First with Tallis
Posted: 02 Nov 2006 @ 00:00
IT LOOKS as though Truro Cathedral has been the first to
celebrate 2005 as the 500th-anniversary year of the birth of Thomas Tallis who,
with his pupil and fellow musician, William Byrd, was one of the greatest
composers of English church music.
Only three days into the new year, the cathedral held a choral evensong
devoted entirely to Tallis. The regular choir was on holiday, but a Lay Vicar,
John Buckland, organised a choir of nearly 60, including regular choir members,
volunteers, and members of local choral societies, says the Precentor, Canon
Perran Gay.
Several hundred people filled the nave, and what many of them had come
specially to hear was the motet Spem in alium, written for eight choirs of five
separate voices. Canon Gay tells me that when he was at King’s College,
Cambridge, “we practised it for weeks and weeks”.
The scratch choir in Truro had only a day of rehearsal. Even so, David
Cheetham, the Lay Vicar who conducted, managed to hold them all together, even
in the 40th bar when all 40 voices sing different notes — “a dense tapestry of
sound”.