RTP-area local music and culture

["Nathaniel Florin" <npflorin AT gmail.com>]

When I was down for a visit a couple of weekends ago I noticed that
the Tallis Scholars are performing at Duke Chapel this Friday (10/17)
as part of Duke's arts series, performing a series of late
Renaissance/high Counterreformation Spanish vocal works, mainly
motets, I think. I know this isn't the usual sort of show to get
pimped here, but in March I had the opportunity to see them perform a
similar program (more Portuguese) in a similar setting and found it to
be one of the most stunning things I had ever experienced. The music
tends towards a pretty complex series of cascading vocal lines,
generally sung very forcefully, without a lot of general dynamic
(i.e., the whole tends to be at a fairly consistent volume and
intensity), but with a very dynamic internal polyphony as the voices
rise and fall and come and go individually or (more usually) paired.
And my god it's gorgeous. It was one of the rare moments in my life
that I wished I'd been born Catholic.

There's a youtube video on Duke's site which gives you some sense of
the Tallis Scholars, but it's a performance of a piece by an Italian
from a half-century before the Spanish works they'll be doing Friday,
which sounds a lot more familiar than the Spanish stuff, not to
mention less wild and a lot less compelling. There were also fewer
Tallis Scholars when I saw them, only nine plus the conductor, I
think.

http://dukeperformances.duke.edu/programs/espana/tallis.php

Ite misse est,
Nate