LET it first be said that I am a big fan of Composer of the Week (Radio 3, weekdays of last week). There are few opportunities in the BBC schedules for such thorough and focused examination of a musical œuvre, especially now that the “great composer” model of music history is regarded with increasing scepticism.
Over the course of a week, the presenter, Donald Macleod, links together substantial musical extracts with commentaries that provide historical context, biographical detail, and take-home anecdotes.
The task is harder when you are dealing with a composer such as Thomas Tallis, about whom very little is known beyond the dots on the page. We don’t even have an image of him dating earlier than a couple of centuries after his death. Macleod reached instead for local colour: the ghastly stench of London, the fine cuts of meat to be found at Tallis’s local butcher, and much else designed to pass the time between one great polyphonic anthem and the next.
One sometimes wondered whether the presenter had actually listened to the tracks that he was introducing: an organist uncredited; a section of Latin text translated for the listener’s benefit which had never appeared in the recording; schoolboy errors suggesting an over-reliance on CD-liner notes.
The genius of Tallis lies partly in his ability to adapt to the changing liturgical culture of mid-Tudor England. These changes entailed not only compositional style, but size of ensemble and the physical spaces in which the music was sung — not that you would know it from the recordings chosen here. Almost without exception, they imagined the music in some gloriously reverberant chapel, although — paradoxically — sung by ensembles of men and adult women. We boast in this country some of the finest interpreters of Renaissance polyphony; yet it would have been instructive to hear a greater variety of approaches: more recordings, for instance, by choirs with children singing the upper parts, and small ensembles working in drier, domestic acoustics.
As Macleod pointed out, by the time a piece such as the famous Lamentations was written, the vaulted acoustics of pre-Reformation England were largely silent; and yet the music sounds just as affecting in the chamber as in the chapel.
A great murder-mystery is as much a feat of engineering as of literature. If you are one of those aficionados who love an intricate mechanism, then you will be fascinated by Death at Broadcasting House (Radio 4, weekdays of last week). Adapted from a novel of 1934 by Holt Marvell and Val Gielgud (brother of the actor), the story involves a murder committed during the live broadcast of a radio play. The narrator is Tim McInnerny, who can realise a dozen shades of BBC English, and one of the few actors alive capable of pulling off such a preposterous denouement. I won’t give it away; but suffice to say, I will be mistrustful from now on of any pianist capable of playing a Chopin Mazurka.