The Tallis Scholars – 50th Birthday Concert
Saturday 3rd June 2023 at 8:00 pm

Peter Phillips has dedicated his career to the research and performance of Renaissance polyphony, and to the perfecting of choral sound. He founded The Tallis Scholars in 1973, with whom he has now appeared in over 2,300 concerts and made over 60 discs, world-wide. As a result of this commitment Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars have done more than any other group to establish the sacred vocal music of the Renaissance as one of the great repertoires of Western classical music.

Peter Phillips also conducts other specialist ensembles. He is currently working with the BBC Singers, the Netherlands Chamber Choir, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Intrada (Moscow) and El Leon de Oro (Spain). He is Patron of the Chapel Choir of Merton College Oxford.

In addition to conducting, Peter Phillips is well-known as a writer. For 33 years he contributed a regular music column to The Spectator. In 1995 he became the publisher of The Musical Times, the oldest continuously published music journal in the world. His first book, English Sacred Music 1549-1649, was published by Gimell in 1991, while his second, What We Really Do, appeared in 2013. During 2018, BBC Radio 3 broadcast his view of Renaissance polyphony, in a series of six hour-long programmes, entitled The Glory of Polyphony.

In 2005 Peter Phillips was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. In 2008 Peter helped to found the chapel choir of Merton College Oxford, where he is a Bodley Fellow; and in 2021 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford.

www.thetallisscholars.co.uk

I got the polyphony bug when an undergraduate at Oxford in 1973. An ideal choral sound got fixed in my head at that time, and I’ve spent all the years since then trying to recapture it. Hence The Tallis Scholars. I haven’t done much else of creative importance – no novels or films – just a lot of concerts and recordings, and endless travelling. This in turn has piqued an interest in exploring the cuisines of the world, and even some of the languages, though rarely the right ones. A thorough grasp of Latin would have been good; Arabic has proved of limited value as a tool for promoting Christian sacred music.

Other daft things I’ve done include: starting a choral foundation in Oxford’s oldest and most beautiful college chapel; writing a column in the London Spectator on music for over 33 years, and on cricket for one; planning a choir trip to the Antarctic so that the penguins may get to hear some decent music (Chris Watson will be singing the opening solo in Walton’s Set me as a seal); encouraging my fellow citizens to eat horse; learning to fly small aeroplanes; carrying rare foodstuffs (especially horse) around the world in my luggage, and visiting a restaurant near my house so often that I now have my own table there. The best thing I’ve done is marry Caroline Trevor and help to bring up three children who, to my lasting relief and delight, have grown into very civilised people.