Thomas Tallis wrote unforgettable sacred music at a time of great religious turmoil. In his lifetime (1505-1585), he was asked to write music for Catholic services, in Latin, and for services for the new Anglican church, in vernacular English, where brevity and textural clarity were of paramount importance. Tallis excelled at both, and in his lifetime created a style which melded the distinctive, florid English style with its wide tessitura and rich harmonies, with the narrower-ranged Continental styles of the time. Tallis remained a public personality for much of his life, but may have given richest expression to his private voice in a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. The texts are from the lessons for Maundy Thursday, but were set in Latin at a time when they would not likely have been used in an actual service. These were more likely meant for private devotions, and Tallis devotes his finest creative energies to setting the first five verses, along with a Hebrew letter to delineate each of the verses (aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, heth). The settings are for five voice parts, and divided into two sections, and are full of his finest work—words are savored, carefully lingered over but always at the service of expressing the textual meaning; voices work in a complex polyphony with one-on-four, two-on-three, and five individually voiced textures at varying points; and the richness of melodic ideas, particularly in the Hebrew letters, are all breathtaking to behold.

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