Tuesday 17 March - No Resting Place

The release of our latest disc on March 13^th 2026 has been years in the making. Entitled No Resting Place, all the music is by Nico Muhly, celebrating a partnership which began on the 13^th November 2013 in Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College in Easton PA, when we gave the world premiere of Recordare. This was the first piece that Nico had written for us. Five more followed, which make up this disc of almost exactly an hour. It is released on Linn Records, our first project with them.

We took to Nico’s music like the proverbial ducks. The number of discs we have dedicated to contemporary composers comes to precisely three (as opposed to the over 60 we have dedicated to renaissance composers): Muhly, Pärt and Tavener (recorded in 1984, and forgotten in the current Gramophone review of the Muhly). The extent to which we have taken to Nico’s music has taken even me by surprise. Being a nerd I collect numbers, which my super-amazing database can help me with. We have so far sung music by Nico on 90 separate occasions, since that first outing in 2013. Rough Notes tops the chart with 37 performances since its premiere in 2018. No Resting Place itself, probably the most enduring masterpiece of all of them, we have only sung twice on account of its length – nearly 25 minutes, and so almost half a concert. I have been cautious about programming half a concert with a modern piece the public have not heard of, but hope this recording will change that. Meanwhile Rough Notes (at 10 minutes), A Glorious Creature(at 9 minutes), Recordare (at 7 minutes), Marrow (at 3 minutes) and Prosperitie (at 2 minutes) have given us wonderful programming opportunities.

Both the eponymous No Resting Place and Recordare are based in the Book of Lamentations. I specifically asked for these texts (as I also asked Matthew Martin when he first wrote for us), partly because it is attractive to programme a contemporary setting alongside a renaissance one, and partly because the structure of a verse from that Book is itself helpful to a composer – the Hebrew letter giving the opportunity for purely abstract writing (didn’t Tallis love that opportunity too?), and then the intensely moving words of loss which follow. In the Bible all this is book-ended by the unforgettable ‘Incipit lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae’, building to ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad dominum deum tuum’ at the end. In No Resting Place, Nico keeps the Hebrew letter followed by Latin text of lament formula, but in each segment adds a reflection in English by a member of the Windrush generation, so bringing the experience up-to-date. In this he took Britten’s War Requiem as his model, though in Nico’s arrangement there are five such segments after the ‘Incipit’ introduction, before they make their way to the ‘Jerusalem’ conclusion. The Hebrew letters in question are Aleph, Beth, Ghimel, Daleth and He.

The genius behind all this music is the understanding Nico showed from the beginning of how to use the Tallis Scholars’ highly individual sound to expressive ends. I didn’t have to explain that this sound comes from our habitual scoring of four high sopranos, two altos, two tenors, baritone and bass. The key is the use of the sopranos above the altos. Many composers from the 18^th century onwards have written alto parts as if they were really a kind of second soprano. In the renaissance period nothing could have been further from what the altos (or countertenors) had to do in terms of range. For these composers (from the Eton Choirbook to Purcell), the alto parts are extraordinarily low, regularly going down into the tenor range. This is the music we have specialised in for decades so, however inconvenient those low notes can sometimes be for modern singers, we know how to manage them. With four sopranos above them there is the opportunity for the kind of luminous texture which composers like John Browne in the Eton Choirbook were so adept at writing (Nico cites Browne as an inspiration), founded on the altos as a kind of bass part within a high grouping. Nico first experimented with this in Recordare, most strikingly at the beautiful ‘Jerusalem’ writing where the four soprano wheel round each other in almost perpetual motion; and never looked back.

The reality of a ten-part texture throughout a substantial piece of music fascinated me in prospect, and now I have a whole disc of it. Ten-part writing is extremely rare in renaissance music, and when it does happen, as in Tomkins’ Third Service, I start to levitate. The most recent piece on the disc - A Glorious Creature – is the epitome of this technique, the ten voices constantly being called back to illustrate the rays of the sun which Nico, in his note to the disc, likens to depictions of the sun-god Aten, ‘with the sun as a single sphere whose rays reach out and actually touch, with leaf-shaped hands, his people.’ We love to sing this piece (so far 8 performances), though its premiere gave it something of a bumpy start. This took place in Middle Temple Hall on the 3^rd November 2023, marking the 50^th anniversary of our first-ever public appearance. Of course we wanted to include this latest commission, but for some reason the copies only arrived on the day, leaving us with very little time to prepare it. Since the writing is not easy, we found ourselves working unexpectedly hard, all our skill at sight-reading tested. I wrote in my journal that in the performance we came close to what Nico had written, but had little energy left for the rest of a demanding evening.

On a personal note I would like to mention the shortest item – Prosperitie. This was written to mark my 70^th birthday, and first performed on a boat on the Thames, with Nico conducting. It was fun, as has the rest of this project been. Both Nico and I make the point that this disc is the culmination of a project, not the end of a collaboration.