Recordings > Choral and Song
VICTORIA:
Lamentations of Jeremiah
The Tallis Scholars, Phillips. Latin text with translations. Gimell CDGIM 043
The Roman Catholic services for Holy Week include Tenebrae, with specific readings, responses and psalms that focus on lamenting and repentance as preparation for the joyous, pivotal celebration of Christ's resurrection on Easter Sunday. The Lamentations of Jeremiah, part of these services, have inspired countless composers to a variety of musical settings; sixteenth-century choral settings were plentiful, but those by the Spanish Renaissance composer Tomas Luis de Victoria are among the most intensely beautiful and affecting.
The Tallis Scholars and director Peter Phillips celebrate their fiftieth CD recording (and thirty years working for their own label) with this collection. Although the nine pieces were meant to be heard in cycles of three over three days, Victoria's set makes a fine CD recital, especially with the addition of a later partial Lamentation setting by Juan Gutierrez de Padilla.
Before he left Rome (where he had been studying and working for more than twenty years), in 1587, Victoria published the Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae (1585), a setting of all necessary texts for the Holy Week services, including the nine Lamentations. One peculiarity of the Latin texts that was retained by composers was the opening line, "Here begins the lamentation of the prophet Jeremiah," a literal announcement of the reading. Another formality is the inclusion of the Hebrew letters ("Aleph," "Iod," "Teth," etc.) that introduce each verse and serve as paragraph markers. In addition, the commanding refrain to each of these nine readings, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return unto the Lord thy God," has often inspired the darkest, most desperate musical settings.
Victoria's massed chordal effects are produced by undulating polyphonic lines that are neither showy nor extreme, but which energize the texture. An earlier manuscript copy of the set exists in the Sistine Chapel Library and shows a more rhapsodic, less intense working out of the texts.
The legendary blend and vocal finesse of the Tallis Scholars serve this music superbly, and when a voice part requires prominence (such as the tenor in the second lamentation for Maundy Thursday), the highlighting is both technically perfect and intensely emotional. Victoria often highlights extreme register separation (as in the second lamentation of Holy Saturday) and favors a high tessitura, easy work for the sixteen-voice Scholars.
JUDITH MALAFRONTE
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