With the appearance of these two releases and the promise of others to come in the near future, Victoria's Tenebrae Responsories will soon rival the three Masses of William Byrd and Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli as the most recorded vocal polyphony of the sixteenth century. It's as if every choir, every record company, feels the urge to put forward its own version of these motets, even at the risk of glutting the market. Why such duplication, you may ask, at the expense of the rest of the repertoire?
Part of the reason lies in the music itself, which is potent and hard-hitting by the standards of Victoria's day. But there's an added impetus: the Tenebrae Responsories were among the first major works of the sixteenth century to be committed to LP, sung by the Choir of Westminster Cathedral under George Malcolm in a 1959 Argo recording (nla) that still ranks as one of the most striking interpretations of Renaissance music ever released. Such is the power and pathos of those performances, evocative of the high ceremony of Holy Week ritual into which Victoria's settings fit, that they created a sensation at the time and are still widely respected today. Small wonder, then, that so many ensembles and record companies feel confident in taking on works that already enjoy such a legendary performing tradition.
Following George Malcolm's time-honoured layout, The Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips sing all 18 responsories as a sequence, shunning the liturgical context which, in Holy Week services, would have distributed the settings over three days, liberally interspersed with plainchant. Like Malcolm, Phillips seeks drama and passion in the music, and his readings are painstakingly chiselled, every last detail of nuance being carefully planned and executed. Inevitably this is at the expense of spontaneity. Atmosphere too is in short supply: for all that The Tallis Scholars set new standards of precision, accuracy and tuning in these performances, the music has become thoroughly secularized, all but purged of the sense of its ritual significance.
The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge offers a less stereotyped package. Here only the nine Second Nocturn responsories are sung, each group of three being prefaced by Victoria's complementary polyphonic Lectio (or ''Lamentation'') for the corresponding First Nocturn. Although this solution too gives a compromised view of the liturgy, at least it avoids the false impression of a string of connected motets, each requiring bold characterization in order to sustain the listener's interest. Whereas the responsories are short and sharp, there's an elegant breadth and languor in Victoria's music for the Lamentations, and the alternation of the two styles makes an effective contrast. In the responsories, the Trinity choir succeeds in conveying the sentiments of the texts without straying into the dangerous territory of high drama. The Lamentations, on the other hand, are sung with such smoothness and restraint that the effect becomes soporific in its controlled blandness, the fervour of the texts suppressed in the interests of sonority and choral unanimity. It is the epitome of English restraint, for better or for worse.
As an interim assessment of the current catalogue, made in the knowledge that further releases are imminent, my first choice for a recording of the Tenebrae Responsories remains the 1989 Westminster Cathedral version directed by David Hill for Hyperion. Not even the high polish of The Tallis Scholars and the superb discipline of Trinity College Choir can compensate for the fact that these are first and foremost liturgical works with their roots deeply embedded in the performing traditions of the Roman Catholic Church. It was precisely those qualities of ritual and tradition that informed the singing in George Malcolm's pioneering 1959 recording, and it is Hill's interpretation that unquestionably stands as its most spiritual heir.'