The iTunes classical chart hasn’t been around very long, but for the time it has been available the number one slot has usually featured Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun dorma’. Nothing wrong with that, except that the chart was invented specifically to encourage the current classical music scene and give an impression of who was doing what within it. Now a piece written 450 years ago — Tallis’s ‘Spem in alium’ — has taken over at the top, in a recording by the Tallis Scholars.
Manna sure drops from heaven in unpredictable ways. This posting has come as a result of the success of an erotic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James, where it is suggested that Tallis’s music is the ultimate turn-on. Half of me can’t quite believe that a penitential Latin-texted motet of the most extreme intellectual complexity (it has 40 independent vocal parts) might qualify for this purpose; the other half can’t believe what the media is capable of, once it gets its teeth into something.
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