Oct 9: ECM New Series Releases The Tallis Scholars - Live in Venice
The Tallis Scholars
Live in Venice
Works by Monteverdi, Palestrina, Lotti, Allegri, Komitas, Pärt
Peter Phillips, conductor
ECM New Series 2732/33
Release Date: October 9, 2026
Digital and CD/Blu-ray Set
Downloads and CD/Blu-ray Set available upon request.
The Tallis Scholars, founded by their conductor Peter Phillips in 1973, belong among the world’s preeminent chamber choirs and have championed the sacred vocal music of the Renaissance like no other ensemble. Here they are captured in a remarkable concert recorded on 14 July 2017 in the glorious Basilica di San Marco in Venice. Issued as a 1-CD/1-Blu-ray set, the release offers both an intimate listening experience and the rare opportunity to witness the performance from within the basilica itself, where the acoustics of the historic space become an integral part of the music.
Renaissance polyphony permeates this programme, which was conceived around the 450th anniversary celebrations of Claudio Monteverdi’s birth in 2017. Alongside music by Monteverdi himself are compositions by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Antonio Lotti and Gregorio Allegri, among them Allegri’s celebrated Miserere and Palestrina’s Magnificat – works with which the Tallis Scholars have become closely identified over the years. Yet the programme also reaches beyond the Renaissance, placing this great tradition of sacred polyphony in dialogue with music of a very different historical and cultural origin.
In the concert’s programme note, printed in the CD-accompanying booklet, Peter Phillips speaks of “old favourites and some very new ideas”. The new ideas are represented by Arvo Pärt’s Nunc dimittis on the one hand, (The piece, composed in 2001, also appears on the label in a performance by Vox Clamantis, on the ensemble’s 2025 album And I Heard A Voice.) and on the other by the music by Komitas, whose works the Tallis Scholars performed as a gesture of solidarity with the Armenian community of Venice. Phillips and the ensemble “wish to pay tribute to the centuries-old heritage of the Armenian community in Venice”, creating a connection between the musical traditions of the city and the living cultural memory of its Armenian presence.
The composers represented here illuminate the rich and varied history of sacred vocal music. Monteverdi stands at the threshold between Renaissance polyphony and the emerging Baroque, bringing the contrapuntal inheritance of the sixteenth century into a new expressive language. Palestrina, by contrast, became the defining figure of the Roman Renaissance, his lucid polyphony long regarded as an ideal of liturgical writing. Antonio Lotti, born and active in Venice, continued the Venetian tradition into the eighteenth century and served as maestro di cappella at San Marco, making his presence in this particular setting especially resonant. Gregorio Allegri, a Roman composer and singer associated with the Sistine Chapel, is remembered above all for his Miserere, whose restrained setting of Psalm 51 became one of the most famous sacred works of the Western tradition.
Alongside these European masters stand two works by Komitas (Soghomon Soghomonian), the Armenian priest, composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist whose work preserved and transformed the musical heritage of Armenia. Like Pärt, his compositions bring a modern, deeply personal voice to a programme otherwise rooted in centuries-old Western sacred polyphony.
The Tallis Scholars are in the midst of an international tour as this album is released, with concerts in Bogotá, Colombia (1 Oct.); Florence, Italy, at the Teatro Niccolini (25 Oct.); and Cambridge, UK, at King’s College Chapel (28 Oct.), followed by performances in South Korea and China in November.
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