The first half of the seventeenth century saw a late flowering of the renaissance polyphonic idiom in Portugal, resulting in a treasure-trove of music already explored a little some years ago by Pro Cantione Antiqua's ''Voces Angelicae'' box set, recently reissued on three CDs (Teldec (CD) 246 005-2). Here, however, a whole disc is dedicated to just one of the composers represented there, Frei Manuel Cardoso, a monk who spent most of his life in Lisbon, but who was well versed in the Palestrina canon: all the Masses of his 1625 publication parody motets by the Italian master. Cardoso, in his own way, was a master of the polyphonic idiom, though by the time he was composing in the first decades of the seventeenth century his harmonic language had begun to reflect the changes in the air by accommodating the chromaticisms and progressions of the baroque, and thus, as Peter Phillips points out in the accompanying booklet (excellently produced as always), mixing old and new.
In the Requiem, however, and despite the augmented interval in the head motif, the idiom, with the chant in long note values in the upper part, seems deliberately to look further backwards still to the very earliest polyphonic Requiem setting by a Portuguese composer: that by Pedro de Escobar whose work, though very much more rudimentary, is based on the same principle. There is no doubt that Cardoso's Requiem is a remarkable piece, but it does pose considerable problems for modern performers, not all of which are successfully overcome in either of the recorded versions so far available, very different though they are. The Tallis Scholars go for a monumental approach, generally taking the pace more slowly than PCA but maintaining an intensely sonorous and sustained singing style that in many ways suits the music admirably. The trouble is that there is a tendency for the overall effect to be rather solid, too often static, the 'timelessness' that Phillips clearly hopes to achieve being realized successfully at times but at others the performance seems merely suspended in time with nowhere to go.
The other problem concerns balance: the scoring of the Requiem, SSAATB with the chant in the soprano, is in any case top-heavy and, except where the basses occasionally really go for it, there is not enough weighting to the lower part of the texture. This would seem to be exacerbated by the relatively high pitch adopted here: in many ways the lower range and all-male sonority of PCA's recording work better, although there the individual solo voices are a little too uneven for comfort. This would, indeed, seem to be choral rather than one-to-a-part music, though as yet we know too little about the conditions under which Cardoso worked to be able to work out the forces for which it might originally have been conceived. With these reservations in mind (and, I have to say, they hardly apply to the motets included on the disc which, more fluid in style, are performed quite superbly), this is nevertheless another excellent recording from The Tallis Scholars of some very interesting music: you should add it to your Gimell collection.'