cancelled
Masterpiece week Tallis
- big, bigger, biggest: Renaissance composers made a sport of writing polyphony for as many voices as possible; Spem in alium is the greatest of those works in every respect
- Tallis may have felt that Alessandro Striggio’s Missa Ecce beatam lucem, which was sung in London in June, 1557, had set him a challenge
- the work inspired many later artists, Janet Cardiff for instance, whose installation Forty Part Motet was exhibited by the Concertgebouw in Bruges’s St John’s Hospital in 2012
- the motet is a plea for divine grace; this had particular significance for the Catholic Tallis who was living in Protestant England
In collaboration with 