The Tallis Scholars have been performing the music of Josquin regularly in concert for over 20 years. Their 1986 CD of his music remains the only recording of Early Music to have won the Gramophone Record of the Year Award. This new release is the fourth CD in The Tallis Scholars’ projected Complete Josquin Mass Cycle.
"It has recently become a favourite intellectual game to compare Josquin’s career with that of Beethoven. Essentially the point is that Josquin was as influential a composer in his time as Beethoven was in his; but the subplot is that Josquin ought to be taken as seriously as any later composer even though he lived so long ago and only wrote for voices. These Mass-settings are two of the finest to come from any pen." Peter Phillips
“Peter Phillip's pre-eminently clear-sighted direction… may carry with it a certain detachment, but the architecture of Josquin's edifices is allowed to emerge untrammelled by well-meaning expressive accretions, and to speak for itself with a directness and intellectual power that compels from first note to last.” BBC Music Magazine, March 2009 ****
“…as a piece of ensemble-singing the disc is hugely impressive and I suspect that listeners will come away feeling that they've learnt something important about Josquin.” Gramophone Magazine, April 2009
“Adventurous harmonies pour forth, though the calm radiance of Peter Phillips's singers always soothes the temples in these two Masses spun from secular songs.” The Times, 7th March 2009 ****
“The choir’s lucid vocal textures highlight the mastery of Josquin's interweaving vocal lines. Their tone is clear and sonorous, the phrases are beautifully shaped, and the mood solemn but warm.” Charlotte Gardner, bbc.co.uk, 12th March 2009
“it is the beauty of the flowing forward momentum which is so compelling in Josquin's writing throughout...[the Missa Fortuna] makes a particularly rewarding coupling, sung with great conviction and comparable flexibility by the Tallis Scholars, and beautifully recorded. Peter Phillips's notes are exemplary too.” Penguin Guide, 2011 edition
“the performance standards are amazingly high. Furthermore, though the performances are obviously grounded in scholarship that scholarship is worn lightly: these performances are exciting, compelling and often moving.” MusicWeb International, May 2013
