For Nico Muhly’s Composer-in-Focus season, The Tallis Scholars trace a musical conversation across five centuries, pairing Phinot, Palestrina and Sheppard with three works written especially for the ensemble over more than a decade of collaboration.

Written with The Tallis Scholars’ distinctive sound in mind, Muhly’s No Resting Place, Recordare and A Glorious Creature combine contemporary musical language with a deep understanding of Renaissance polyphony, preserving the clarity, balance and luminous sonority for which the ensemble is renowned.

Alongside Muhly’s music, The Tallis Scholars perform three of its most cherished Renaissance works by Phinot, Palestrina and Sheppard. These pairings reveal shared texts, themes and musical influences: Phinot and Palestrina echo ideas found in No Resting Place and Recordare, while Sheppard’s rich sound world and soaring soprano lines offer a fascinating precursor to Muhly’s writing.

Together, these works illuminate the creative relationship between past and present, revealing how music separated by five centuries can speak to one another with remarkable freshness and immediacy.

Programme:
Dominique Phinot Lamentations
Nico Muhly No Resting Place
Recordare
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Lamentations
John Sheppard Ave Maris Stella
Nico Muhly A Glorious Creature