Devotee of Sacred Renaissance Choral Music Defies the Odds

When Peter Phillips began an amateur group to pursue his interest in the esoteric field of Renaissance sacred choral music, he could not imagine that a decade later he would be conducting concerts in front of an audience of 2,000 in South Korea and producing as many as eight discs a year on his own label.

Today, Phillips’ personal passion for the pure tones and refined details of Renaissance music has reached a surprisingly extensive international audience.

Phillips’ group, the Tallis Scholars, which appears Thursday at Ambassador Auditorium, annually performs about 90 concerts internationally and has made 35 recordings.

“The thrilling thing is that what we do, against all the odds, really seems to get through to people,” Phillips remarked during a recent interview. A tall, lanky Englishman in his late-30s, Phillips tempers his formidable, comprehensive knowledge with evident, eager enthusiasm as he discusses his work.

Phillips founded the chamber choir in 1978 while a student attending Oxford on an organ scholarship. Named after the 16th-Century English composer Thomas Tallis, it was an amateur operation until 1981.

That was also when Phillips and producer Steve C. Smith founded Gimell Records, which exists exclusively to record the Tallis Scholars. Snubbed by the existing, established record labels, they decided to do things their own way.

“Not only were the big labels not interested in us--which I can understand because we were very new at the time--but also it was clear that they had no interest in the repertory that we wanted to put forward,” Phillips noted.

The subject brings out an intensity and quiet anger in Phillips: “It seems the recording industry is willing to pick at this repertory occasionally, but not go into it thoroughly. So we created our own market.”

And quite a market is soon proved to be. Gimell’s discs are distributed in this country by Harmonia Mundi, and the two-man operation (“We set up the label by mortgaging our houses,” Phillips said) has attracted distributors in many other nations as well.

While some may consider the Tallis Scholars’ repertory to be narrowly circumscribed, Phillips spoke enthusiastically of its extensiveness and variety and of the many works the group has yet to perform or record.

“There are many areas we’ve just touched on,” Phillips said, “with the intention of going back and exploring further.”