Byrd: The sweet and merry month of May

16th-century England was a place of much religious change. It was a dangerous and confusing time and it is testament to their incredible skill and musical mastery that composers like Tallis and Byrd were able to produce such magnificent works in such troubled times. Their music left a lasting legacy, influencing some of our most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century composers and surviving over half a millennium to be performed as widely today as they have ever been.

This disc features some of the best-loved classics of Tudor and Jacobean church music together with madrigals by Tallis, Byrd and Gibbons. They are performed alongside pieces by Britten, Tippett and MacMillan including the Five Spirituals from A Child of Our Time and the Choral Dances from Gloriana. The Sixteen has performed this repertoire around the world over the last six years and is one of the ensemble’s most popular concert programmes.

The myth of springtime is a brilliant metaphor for love, an ever-inspiring subject for pœts and musicians. This recording assembles a tapestry of tiny pœtic and musical gems from sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Italy, England, and France. Youth, beauty, and love are their inspiration. Some are well-known, some rescued from dusty library volumes, and others remain part of our folk culture and are reborn in this collection in new forms. Perhaps music, as the most temporal of the arts, is the most appropriate medium to express the transience of the subject at hand