I've listened to this several times since the beginning of Lent, as it seems appropriate to the season. That, plus a sort of mood that made it seem appealing (and thus hardly penitential), plus a desire to make another attempt at grasping Renaissance polyphony, prompted me to get out this LP, which I've had for many years.

The recording was originally made in the mid-1950s by the Deller Consort, a vocal ensemble led by Alfred Deller, who in my youth (the decade after the '50s) was known as an important proponent of the counter-tenor voice (his own) and of early music. According to Discogs, it's been re-issued a number of times, including several on CD in the '90s, so apparently it still has, or at least thirty years ago still had, admirers.

I am a little ashamed to say that I don't really get Renaissance polyphony, in the same way that I don't entirely get the fugue. It has something to do with my brain's inability to follow, in a sense even to hear, more than two voices, two melody lines, simultaneously. And it has something to do with the basic nature of the music, which is about the interplay of multiple--four or five--melody lines. In the style generally, and in this instance particularly, the movement of these lines results in a very ingenious  and continually shifting interplay of voices and the rhythms of the text (almost by definition, this style is the setting of a text). I don't mean rhythm in the  sense of a beat, but in the way a unit of text--a sentence, say--is woven among the voices, each one proceeding separately from the others, not generally on the same syllable at the same time, or for the same length of time, all coming together on the final syllable of the sentence. 

And I admire it, but am not often touched by it. My basic problem reveals something lacking in my response to music. It's simple: I want a tune, or to start with a tune. I mean of course not just something that is technically a melody, but one that is appealing in itself. And in this kind of music I don't often get it. That coming-together of the voices in a sustained chord is usually the part I most enjoy. 

Here's an interesting video of a performance of the first part (of two) of the piece by the Tallis Scholars, who seem to be widely considered one of the best ensembles working with this music. The video moves through the score with the singers, so you get a visual image of the weaving of the voices. 

Here is the King James version of the text:

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!

She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.

I don't like this performance as much as I do the Deller one, in part because it doesn't seem as balanced among the voices. The lower men's voices are not as prominent, which seems to flatten the piece, even though the Tallis Scholars are a larger ensemble. The small Deller group (five people, one voice per part) makes the music less grand, in a good way--more personal. Something I ran across while looking for information on the work suggested that it may not actually have been intended for formal liturgical use, but for small groups gathered in a home. The writer--and I'm sorry I didn't make a note of his or her name and that of the web site--thought that Tallis, having remained Catholic through the religious revolution of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, might have found the Jeremiah text particularly appropriate for such use.

And I actually prefer the counter-tenor to the women's voices in this piece. Back in the early days when I first bought that LP and first heard the counter-tenor voice, I thought it was more or less a freak and didn't care much for it. Now it seems most appropriate for much of this kind of music. Perhaps that's partly because it makes for a more smoothly blended (and darker) color across the separate threads, reinforcing the perception of every moment of the piece as a unity? At any rate that's the way it seems to work for me in this performance of this piece. 

The Deller recording was monaural, of course, but my LP is one of those "rechanneled for stereo" releases of which there were many after stereo had become the norm and mono was considered obsolete, or at least treated that way by record companies. (Not to mention that for many years there was a price difference--the record company could charge more if they could put the "stereo" label on the jacket). I got the impression at the time that audiophiles hated the "rechanneled" sound, and now I'm curious about the difference. On Discogs I found several inexpensive copies of the original mono release, and I'm actually going to order one, just out of curiosity. 

If you're interested, here's a knowledgeable discussion of rechanneled i.e. fake stereo.