E-Mail This Article to a Friend Tallis tales Plus more Handel and Musicians from Marlboro BY DAVID WEININGER

The year 2003 has been a big one for Peter Phillips. Not only is he celebrating his 50th birthday, but the Tallis Scholars — the vocal ensemble that he founded and conducts and that will be in Boston next Friday — are celebrating their 30th anniversary. So an interviewer’s first question can only be: which is the more important milestone?

"Well, I’m not really sure," he laughs over the phone from London. "I don’t mind being 50, but it seems as though the group had been around forever." He notes that the average life span of early-music ensembles is around 25 years. Of course, the Tallis Scholars never really fit the period-instrument paradigm. When Phillips founded the group, it was the only modern ensemble to devote itself exclusively to polyphonic vocal music of the Renaissance. "We were part of the early-music scene because we were doing early music. But we’re not reviving a sound that’s held to be authentic, since we don’t know what the original sound was. How can we?" Whereas instrumental groups can at least look at instruments preserved from earlier times, there’s no way to reproduce how the voices sounded. We’re not even sure who sang the high parts of Renaissance vocal works; "It wasn’t necessarily boys," Phillips points out. So he decided to use the best voices he could find — as he chuckles, "We were inauthentic from the word go, and proud of it."

And the sound he fashioned for the Tallis Scholars has become as recognizable as that of any musical ensemble in the world. Seamless blend, impeccable intonation, and flawless ensemble combine to give you a sense of aural perfection. Occasionally it seems almost too perfect — glorious sound for its own sake. I suggest (half-jokingly) to Phillips that the crystalline purity is akin to a narcotic. He likes the comparison: "Yes, the sound is like a drug, and they [people who come to the concerts] go into a kind of reverie, and they don’t want it to stop." But he doesn’t want to push the metaphor, and he certainly doesn’t think that Renaissance music is akin to trance music. "They do have a dreamlike aspect, all superficial. But the music can be listened to in a serious way too. There’s more to it the more you listen, and people aren’t going to get bored with it. We haven’t."

Part of the reason that Phillips hasn’t gotten bored with Renaissance polyphony is that he and the group have played such a large role in directing attention to some neglected composers of the era, like Nicolas Gombert and John Sheppard. He notes with particular pride their recording of a Requiem by the almost forgotten Portuguese composer Manuel Cardoso, a work they came across while preparing to record the better-known Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria. Such recordings "have quietly but persistently changed people’s ideas about these composers’ reputations. And it’s such a privilege to be able to do that sort of thing."

Reflecting on what else has changed since 1973, Phillips points out that what’s now a standard Tallis Scholars program was almost unthinkable back then: "Whole concerts of polyphony were extremely rare." The group recently performed in Hamburg’s largest cathedral for 2500 people. "That is the difference. All of those people wanted to turn out for two and half hours to do nothing but listen to Renaissance polyphony, a concert in which we didn’t sing a note written after 1620."

Of course, the life of any musician has its sacrifices. Phillips calculates that the first concert of the upcoming American tour will be the Tallis Scholars’ 1300th live performance, and he admits that the traveling takes its toll. ("I’m so fed up with airports now.") Still, the prospect of hanging it up isn’t even on his radar. "I’m prepared to go to Hamburg and stand out in front of 2500 people and conduct this music any day of the week," he says cheerfully. "What’s better than that?"

The Tallis Scholars perform next Friday, December 12, at 8 p.m. at the Jesuit Urban Center, in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, 775 Harrison Avenue, as part of the Boston Early Music Festival. Tickets are $22 to $58; call (617) 424-7232.

MORE MESSIAH. If you’re still jonesing for a dose of the season’s greatest hit, head over to Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street, for Boston Baroque’s rendition of Handel’s Messiah, with soloists Sharon Baker, David Walker, Don Frazure, and Michael Dean and Martin Pearlman on the podium. That’s December 12 and 13 at 8 p.m., and tickets are $21 to $56; call (617) 484-9200. Or if you want to skip the holiday thing all together, Musicians from Marlboro makes another visit to the Gardner Museum, 280 the Fenway, bringing a generous helping of chamber music by Mozart, Ginastera, Martinu, and Brahms. That’s at 1:30 p.m., and tickets are $20; call (866) 468-7619.