Our decision to record all the Masses of Josquin des Prez was an article of faith in my terms if ever there was one. I have never believed in anthologising on record – the “complete works” of even the most famous composers never sell as well as the same number of discs of simply great music – but in this case I did think it was worth the risk. Every Mass by Josquin has its own character and sound world, each one as different from the others as Beethoven’s symphonies differ from each other, with the same sense of intellectual diversity – and there are only eight CDs’ worth of them. Many more, and I would have said no. Also, the Tallis Scholars’ recording career has been framed by Josquin Mass records. The first won the Gramophone Record of the Year Award in 1987 and effectively established our reputation as a world-class ensemble; the third won a Diapason d’Or and a Choc from Le Monde de la Musique; the fourth has just been nominated for a Grammy. The fifth is on its way.

We have gone back to recording all our discs in the Chapel of Merton College, Oxford. I first conducted there in 1974 when the proto-Tallis Scholars provided the “tune” to Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia. We started to record in this half-cathedral with its superlative acoustics in 1977 and stayed there for the next 10 years, returning in 2005. Since then I have been asked to set up a choral foundation in the college with (as of now) 18 choral scholars, two organ scholars and an assistant director as well as myself, including of course female sopranos and altos. It has been at the back of my mind that this is the perfect school for the long-term future of the Tallis Scholars, as well as being supremely valuable in itself. And I get to conduct Stainer’s I saw the Lord, which falls well outside what I am normally asked to do. Blair in B minor is just as wonderful. I remain convinced that there is no better building for sound in all the countless buildings we have sung in.

One of the more offbeat delights of our job is to encounter the Latin language every working day of our lives. It is not that we speak it of course, nor necessarily understand every word that we sing of it, but it has a pedigree which will intrigue all those who are interested – as I am – in what surrounds us in Europe. And although dead, I find that Latin still has a genuinely international reach, which I suppose must include all the Chinese, Korean and Japanese people we have sung to over the years. We have given more than 100 concerts in Japan since our first tour there in 1989; and this year I shall again judge the All-Nippon “Let Your Voices Reach the Sky” Festival in Fukushima, when I get the slightly taxing opportunity to hear 100 choirs in two days. Much of what they sing will be in Latin. However, not every culture has shown itself to be so respectful of such antiquity. A newspaper article in Louisville, Kentucky, some years ago put the title of Hassler’s motet Dixit Maria through the spell-check and printed it as “Dixie Maria”. This seemed oddly appropriate, given the location. Even so, we have just completed our 50th tour to North America.

Reflecting on the 30th anniversary of Gimell Records, I realise again what a desperate choice it was that we made in 1980. The problem we faced – apart from the fact that there were almost no independent labels in those days – was not only that the Tallis Scholars were unknown, but so also was the music we wanted to record. This was a disastrous double whammy in a market which relied on famous names in its artists and big record company publicity. It took us several years – and the invention of the CD – to get Gimell off the ground, but it has always been essential that I have never had to pass my repertoire ideas past a committee of businessmen and accountants. Quite simply this freedom has enabled me to establish Renaissance polyphony as a repertoire which could stand alongside any on the concert stages of the world. I wanted the Tallis Scholars to appear in international series, alongside string quartets, chamber orchestras and solo recitalists. To advance this I deliberately looked far and wide in what we recorded, marking the boundaries of the repertoire with masterpieces from every available tradition in Europe.

I realise now that over the long haul Gimell has done as much as any “major” could ever have done for a favoured artist. For 30 years there has never been any question of compromising standards, and not a single title has been deleted. Like the foundation of the Tallis Scholars in 1973, we eventually benefited from having had a good idea at the right time. It was just that we didn’t know it when we started.

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