The recording devoted to a single manuscript has always seemed to be primarily of interest to specialists. But the example here -- a set of partbooks with a missing tenor part (editorially restored) -- works convincingly in this exploration by the virtuoso small vocal group Contrapunctus and its director, Owen Rees. The attraction is that the partbooks cover the better part of a century of music, from cantus firmus pieces by John Sheppard and Robert White to the High Renaissance structures of Thomas Tallis. Actually, the ...
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The recording devoted to a single manuscript has always seemed to be primarily of interest to specialists. But the example here -- a set of partbooks with a missing tenor part (editorially restored) -- works convincingly in this exploration by the virtuoso small vocal group Contrapunctus and its director, Owen Rees. The attraction is that the partbooks cover the better part of a century of music, from cantus firmus pieces by John Sheppard and Robert White to the High Renaissance structures of Thomas Tallis. Actually, the order is reverse chronological: the program opens with one of the towering accomplishments of English Renaissance polyphony, Tallis' Gaude gloriosa Dei mater, a set of nine prayers to the Virgin Mary, and goes backward from there. All the music is unified by Marian texts, and there's no question of "evolution": what you hear is what a group of choristers in the middle 16th century might have read from its choirbooks, and marvel at how musical resources had been and were being...
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