Tallis: Spem in Alium

Instead of waiting for the loudest moment in Spem in alium, notice the arrival of a new line. The interest can lie in overlap: something already sounding makes room for something else. This recording offers two ways of hearing a choir, as an encompassing sonority and as a meeting of separate movements. Neither requires you to identify every singer.

Peter Phillips directs the Tallis Scholars in this 1985 album of Thomas Tallis. Gimell identifies CDGIM006 as the original release and distinguishes it from a later two-disc Tallis collection containing the same works. The date belongs to the recording’s release, not to the composition of the music. The linked digital edition divides seven works into twenty-six indexes; those numbers should not be mistaken for twenty-six separate compositions.

Movement within scale

The title work’s forty parts are independent musical lines, not forty copies of one melody. In their 2010 interview, the recording team recalled arranging the sound to convey eight choirs across a stereo image. Use that recollection as an invitation to move your attention between positions, without expecting headphones to reproduce the experience of standing in the original room.

After the famous opening

Sancte Deus and the two Salvator mundi settings follow the title work. They offer an opportunity to reset your attention instead of waiting for each piece to be larger than the last. Later, Gaude gloriosa extends the programme through a different span. Remember one entrance that caught you, or one place where separate lines seemed to become a shared texture.

A review is another listener

A 1985 review reproduced in Gimell’s anniversary archive praised the spatial distinction between the choirs. That contemporary judgement is separate from the production team’s later recollection, and neither dictates your response. On this digital edition, play indexes one through four to hear the title work complete. A short preview introduces a local texture; it cannot show the proportions of the whole piece.