The Beverley and East Riding early music festival, an increasingly vigorous off-shoot of the York early music festival, gained additional clout this year with the collaboration of the Yorkshire-based BBC Music Live celebrations. Beverley's biggest coup was a rare British appearance (one of only two this year) by Peter Phillips's unparalleled collective of Renaissance specialists, the Tallis Scholars, for a concert of Spanish golden age sacred music broadcast live on Radio 3.
Seville Cathedral and Beverley Minster may seem spiritually poles apart - the former, in its 16th-century heyday, was the most wealthy and influential in Spain; the latter, despite its decorative, cathedral-sized dimensions, is no more than a disproportionately large parish church. But the Tallis Scholars make the imaginative leap. The intensity and expertise that accumulates from almost 30 years' saturation in this repertoire ensures that any Tallis Scholars programme is a transcendental experience.
Even so, there is still something fundamentally bizarre about the atmospherics of 10 singers in evening dress emitting the luxuriant textures of counter-Reformation devotional music in an English parish church. The polyphony is so rich you can almost hear the incense rising from it - we fought off an Armada to avoid listening to this kind of thing at the time.
This comprehensive selection of short motets by Victoria, Morales and Guerrero leads one to reflect that it was really our loss. Although Morales was hailed as the "light of Spain", he and his successor Victoria were international musicians. Both established their reputations in Rome; and they followed Palestrina's lead in ensuring that the intelligibility of the words became paramount in polyphonic music.
The Tallis Scholars respond well to the concrete nature of these compositions. Beautiful though their collective tone may be, Phillips's terse direction never allows things to waft into dreamy, ethereal meaninglessness. Diction is superb; and though Latin is not most people's first language, the meaning of Victoria's desolate motet, Versa est in lictum, is made palpably clear. "My harp is turned to mourning, and my music into the voice of those that weep," proclaims the text. As the Tallis Scholars made this anguished, chromatic descent, Beverley Minster resounded to the sound of a pure heart breaking.
