Rees

Coupling powerful interpretations with path-breaking scholarship, the choir Contrapunctus presents music by the best-known composers as well as unfamiliar masterpieces. Directed by Owen Rees, a specialist in music of the 16th and 17 centuries, the group presents imaginative programmes revealing previously undiscovered musical treasures and throwing new light on familiar works.

This is a perfectly reasonable recording of Bach's works for violin and orchestra and anyone who has not heard the works before will no doubt find them more than adequate. Violinist and leader Jonathan Rees is a fine player with a sweet tone and a warm style and he takes the strings of the Scottish Ensemble through thoroughly professional performances of the works. When joined by spry violinist Jane Murdoch in the Concerto for two violins and plangent oboist Nicholas Daniel in the Concerto for violin and oboe, Rees proves himself a graceful and considerate partner. Virgin's early-'90s sound is a bit thin on top but still clean and clear.

Owen Rees leads early-music consort Contrapunctus alongside The Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford in performances of John Taverner’s masterwork, the Missa Gloria tibi trinitas. A virtuosic work, it has pride of place in the Forrest-Heyther partbooks (in the Bodleian Library in Oxford), which it has been variously argued originated at Cardinal College or at the Chapel Royal.It might well have been heard on Trinity Sunday in the chapel of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s palace at Hampton Court.

Portuguese music enjoyed its most spectacular flowering in the early seventeenth century. Many of the greatest composers were gathered in the capital Lisbon, and this was a period when many Portuguese musicians also made their careers in Spain, which was then linked to Portugal politically. This recording presents masterpieces of Portuguese polyphony from Lisbon and Granada brought to light by the choir’s director, Owen Rees. The Lisbon composers represented are Duarte Lobo (chapelmaster at the Cathedral), Pedro de Cristo (chapelmaster at the Monastery of São Vicente), and Manuel Rodrigues Coelho (organist at the Royal Chapel).

The final instalment in a celebrated three-part series by Contrapunctus, directed by Owen Rees, exploring the music of the Baldwin Partbooks, a remarkable treasure-house of Tudor sacred polyphony, some of which is not found anywhere else.

The pieces of music on this live album were recorded during the concert tour of the Finnish composer, Tomi Räisänen in North Germany in 2014 and 2015, organised by Neue Musik im Ostseeraum (Lübeck). The tour documented the composer’s long-time collaboration and connection with Northern Germany, or as one perhaps can say more descriptively, from a Finnish perspective, with the Southern Baltic Sea.