Live in Venice The Tallis Scholars & Peter Phillips

• Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 - 1594): Magnificat primi toni:
• 1 Palestrina: Magnificat primi toni (Live) 05:34
• Arvo Pärt (b. 1935): Nunc dimittis:
• 2 Pärt: Nunc dimittis (Live) 05:57
• Claudio Monteverdi (1567 - 1643): Messa a 4, SV 190:
• 3 Monteverdi: Messa a 4, SV 190: I. Kyrie (Live) 04:23
• 4 Monteverdi: Messa a 4, SV 190: II. Gloria (Live) 04:53
• 5 Monteverdi: Messa a 4, SV 190: III. Credo (Live) 07:07
• 6 Monteverdi: Messa a 4, SV 190: IV. Sanctus – V. Benedictus (Live) 04:39
• 7 Monteverdi: Messa a 4, SV 190: VI. Agnus Dei (Live) 03:27
• Gregorio Allegri (1582 - 1652): Miserere:
• 8 Allegri: Miserere (Live) 12:15
• Komitas (1869 - 1935): Surp, Surp:
• 9 Komitas: Surp, Surp (Live) 03:02
• Sirt im sasani:
• 10 Komitas: Sirt im sasani (Live) 02:42
• Antonio Lotti (1667 - 1740): Crucifixus a 8:
• 11 Lotti: Crucifixus a 8 (Live) 03:43
• Claudio Monteverdi: Selva morale e spirituale: Crucifixus, SV 259:
• 12 Monteverdi: Selva morale e spirituale: Crucifixus, SV 259 (Live) 02:39
• Adoramus te Christe, SV 289:
• 13 Monteverdi: Adoramus te Christe, SV 289 (Live) 03:06
• Domine, ne in furore, SV 298:
• 14 Monteverdi: Domine, ne in furore, SV 298 (Live) 02:51
• Cantate Domino a 6, SV 293:
• 15 Monteverdi: Cantate Domino a 6, SV 293 (Live) 02:37
• Antonio Lotti: Crucifixus a 10:
• 16 Lotti: Crucifixus a 10 (Live) 03:21
• Total Runtime 01:12:16

Info for Live in Venice

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.

The music crosses centuries without smoothing their fractures, gathering difference into communion. San Marco presses itself like an ear against the sealed tomb, where new life begins as a change in the acoustics of the grave, already turning absence into an organ of hearing.

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
Peter Phillips, director

Recorded in concert July 14, 2017 at Basilica di San Marco, Venice

The Tallis Scholars
Over five decades of performance and a catalogue of award-winning recordings for Gimell, Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars have done more than any other group to establish sacred vocal music of the Renaissance as one of the great repertoires of Western classical music.

They have sought to bring Renaissance works to a wider audience in churches, cathedrals and venues on every continent on the planet except Antarctica! These include the Royal Albert Hall, the Sistine Chapel, the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall New York, the Philharmonic Hall Berlin, Saint Mark's Venice, Seoul Arts Centre Korea, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre London, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Wigmore Hall, Beijing Concert Hall, Megaron Athens and the Opera House Sydney.

The Tallis Scholars continue to develop their exclusive sound, praised by reviewers for its supple clarity and tone, and to bring fresh interpretations to music by contemporary as well as past composers, such as Pärt, Tavener, Whitacre, Muhly and Jackson. ​

"one of the UK’s greatest cultural exports" - BBC Radio 3

Peter Phillips​
I got the polyphony bug when an undergraduate at Oxford in 1973. An ideal choral sound got fixed in my head at that time, and I've spent all the years since then trying to recapture it. Hence The Tallis Scholars. I haven't done much else of creative importance - no novels or films (yet) - just a lot of concerts and recordings, and endless travelling. This in turn has piqued an interest in exploring the cuisines of the world, and even some of the languages, though rarely the right ones. A thorough grasp of Latin would have been good; Arabic has proved of limited value as a tool for promoting Christian sacred music. ​

Other daft things I've done include: starting a choral foundation in Oxford's oldest and most beautiful college chapel; writing a column in the London Spectator on music for over 33 years, and on cricket for one; encouraging my fellow citizens to eat horse; learning to fly small aeroplanes; carrying rare foodstuffs (especially horse) around the world in my luggage, and visiting a restaurant near my house so often that I now have my own table there. The best thing I've done is marry Caroline Trevor and help to bring up three children who, to my lasting relief and delight, have grown into very civilised people.

"Speaking of birds, it was also wonderful to glimpse Peter Phillips’s conducting: hands opening as if setting free a dove, or closing to punctuate with dotting-the-i’s exactitude. I found myself wishing I could get a choir’s-eye view to witness Phillips’ complete – lifelong – inhabiting of this music." - The Observer, September 2015

Booklet for Live in Venice