Thomas Tallis – Ave, rosa sine spinis & other sacred music – The Cardinall’s Musick, Andrew Carwood (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:13:41 minutes | 667 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download – Source: hyperion-records | Digital Booklet | © Hyperion Records
Recorded: November 2013, Fitzalan Chapel, Arundel Castle, United Kingdom
The Cardinall’s Musick and their inspirational director Andrew Carwood present a further volume of their Gramophone-Award-winning series of Tallis’s sacred music.
This new album contains some of the most sublime music of the entire period, performed with The Cardinall’s Musick’s familiar committed, full-blooded and beautiful singing. In including both Tallis’s English and Latin settings, it demonstrates the composer’s mastery of the changing edicts imposed on him from above in this turbulent time.
Informative and scholarly booklet notes by Andrew Carwood place the music in its historical and liturgical context.
The Cardinall’s Musick is vastly experienced in English repertory of the sixteenth century, and this is its fourth disc devoted entirely to Thomas Tallis. With the inclusion of his Mass for four voices they have also completed their survey of his surviving masses. Other delights on the disc include his setting of Why Fum’th in Fight from Archbishop Parker’s Psalter of 1567—perhaps better known as the tune used in Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis—and the wonderful Ave, rosa sine spinis with its missing sections in the cantus part admirably reconstructed here by Nick Sandon.
This last piece really brings out the best in the choir, which shows an intelligent sense of direction and a liveliness of execution. The duets in this work are managed very nicely, too, though the bass part at some points (eg the beginning of verse five) lacks pliability. Elsewhere there is some quite spectacular singing: for example in the cantus line of Euge caeli porta, and in the touching, quiet solemnity of the close of Miserere Nostri. However, the generally rather brisk approach tends to neutralise the potentially very expressive false relations in the harmony (for instance, in Wipe away my sins). As for the four-voiced Mass, this is an unassuming work that risks becoming firmly prosaic, and perhaps the recording by Jeremy Summerly and the Oxford Camerata (on Naxos) does most to overcome its dangers. Even so, this present disc is no mean advocate for Tallis’s musical imagination. —Anthony Pryer, BBC Music Magazine
Tracklist:
Thomas Tallis (c1505-1585)
1 O salutaris hostia[3’11]
2 Wipe away my sins[5’48]
3 Why fum’th in fight (No 3 of 9 Psalm Tunes)[3’54]
4 Ave, rosa sine spinis[10’49]
5 Blessed be thy name[2’30]
6 Te lucis ante terminum I[2’06]
7 In manus tuas, Domine[2’14]
8 Te lucis ante terminum II[1’44]
9 Salvator mundi II[2’55]
10 O come in one to praise the Lord (No 4 of 9 Psalm Tunes)[4’15]
11 When Jesus went into Simon the Pharisee’s house[2’46]
12 Euge caeli porta[1’42]
Mass for four voices
13 Gloria[5’36]
14 Credo[6’13]
15 Sanctus[3’10]
16 Benedictus[3’24]
17 Agnus Dei[5’06]
18 Laudate Dominum[3’54]
19 Miserere nostri[2’24]
Personnel:
The Cardinall’s Musick
Andrew Carwood, conductor
Download:
mqs.link_TallisAversasinespinisthersacredmusicTheCardinallsMusickAndrewCarwd201544.124.rar