In this respect, The Tallis Scholars are less akin to a chamber choir and more like the vocal equivalent of string quartet. Certainly, they have elevated the status of the repertoire they have championed to something akin to chamber music. Once they established their own recording label, Gimell Records (fortuitously around the same time as CDs came into existence) they were also able to popularise their sound well beyond the concert hall. Today they have become nothing less than the standard against which audiences judge how Renaissance polyphonic vocal music should sound.

Their current international tour, of which these concerts form a part, is curated around liturgical music composed for the Sistine Chapel in Rome during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The centrepieces for these Melbourne concerts were two of the best-known works from this era; Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli and Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus.

As Phillips himself has acknowledged, from what we know of the Sistine Chapel Choir it was, for much of its history, far from a highly refined vocal ensemble. The Tallis Scholars, on the other hand, delivered their program superbly and with pin-point accuracy. Phillips is especially well served by the fact that he can draw members of his ensemble from the pinnacle of the English choral tradition (eagle-eyed members of the audience may have recognised a few faces from the Choir of Westminster Abbey who sang at the recent funeral service for Queen Elizabeth II).

In any case, the Melbourne Recital Centre is much less reverberant than a typical Renaissance era chapel or cathedral, let alone the capacious Sistine Chapel. For The Tallis Scholars, it may have been made somewhat drier by the inclusion of four decorative drapes on stage. This was far from fatal to the desired musical result, however. Here I was reminded of the late musicologist Richard Taruskin’s observation that an emphasis on the clarity and ‘objective’ quality of the music is less a demonstration of an ‘authentic’ historical performance practice than it is a powerful expression of our own modern (if not modernist) sensibilities. Performers and listeners alike are ultimately less concerned with fidelity to the liturgical origins and functions of this music than they are with high fidelity, that is, replicating the sound world they have become accustomed to hearing on digital recordings.

This may explain why no attempt was made to curate the works performed according to their liturgical function or meaning. Thus it came to pass that Costanzo Festa’s setting of texts from the Song of Solomon abutted a performance of the first two verse settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah by the French composer Carpentras (Elzéar Genet).

We are being actively invited to contemplate this music as music first and foremost. Perhaps what is historical about this kind of performance practice is that it honours the fact that composers of the time were themselves increasingly concerned with exploring internal musical structures and rhetoric, as well as the then novel idea that a musical composition could have value as a self-sufficient work of art, beyond its social function.

As this concert by The Tallis Scholars amply demonstrates, this is music that rewards close listening, in and of itself, just as visiting a cathedral is worth it just to marvel at its architecture. We do not need to explore the cultural history or ultimate purpose of either to derive significant pleasure from it, although undoubtedly many more cultural riches await us if we subsequently choose to do so.

If there was one overwhelming impression I had after this concert, it was that our continuing strong interest in The Tallis Scholars is fully justified, not just because of the sheer technical brilliance and beauty of their performances but also because they have helped to shape the very culture they now exemplify. The ensemble may be about to turn fifty – the veritable Rolling Stones of Renaissance music – but I have little doubt we’ll be seeing them back in Australia again soon.

Music for the Sistine Chapel was performed in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre on 24 and 25 October 2022. Performance attended: 25 October. The tour culminates at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane on 26 October and City Recital Hall, Sydney on 27 October.