Tunes from the Renaissance -- but still relevant today

At one time a specialist taste, Renaissance a cappella choral music has become almost mainstream thanks to groups such as the excellent Tallis Scholars, which have tilled the field since 1973. Witness their sold-out concert Friday in the Harold M. Williams Auditorium at the Getty Center.

Directed by founder Peter Phillips, the 10 singers concentrated on music by English composers John Taverner, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, who spanned a century of dizzying change in official religion, from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic and again, finally, to Protestant.

Stylistically, in the broadest terms, the changes meant a shift from layered and dense complexity toward a leaner simplicity. (The changes in language from Latin to English were not in evidence in the program. Everything was sung in Latin.)

A secular contemporary audience could easily miss the finer points of doctrinal emphasis, detailed in Sally Dunkley’s fine program notes. But all listeners could revel in the purity of line, the soaring ease and clarity of the singing, the telling emergence of individual parts and their seamless reabsorption into the ensemble.

What a surprise, then, that a piece composed nearly five centuries ago, Tallis’ “Lamentations I,” suddenly seemed so relevant. An impassioned setting of verses from the prophet Jeremiah’s lamenting the fall of Jerusalem and the enslavement of the Israelites, the work became a clarion call for any nation to return to its highest, first principles for its salvation.

The Williams Auditorium did not provide quite the reverberant acoustic in which the music of this period best thrives. At the beginning of the concert, there was an edge of harshness, even stridency in the upper soprano notes. But the group soon adjusted to the setting and its sound became more rich, lush, even oceanic.

Tallis’ Christmas Day “Missa Puer natus est nobis” and Byrd’s “Tribue Domine” (Grant, O Lord) perhaps best exemplified these expansive qualities.

In honor of the upcoming Christmas holiday, the group sang Sweelinck’s “Hodie” as its single encore.