Peter Phillips

The Portuguese school of Renaissance composers is only just beginning to be explored. It came to maturity relatively slowly, and when it finally did, in the first half of the seventeenth century, much of the rest of Europe had moved on to a new musical world. Only countries on the edge of the continent – especially England, Poland and Portugal – continued as late as 1650 to give employment to composers who found creative possibilities in unaccompanied choral music. Even so, very few of these composers remained completely untouched by the experiments of Monteverdi and the new Italian Baroque school, so that their music became a fascinating hybrid, looking forward and back, often unexpectedly introducing twists and turns to what otherwise might be taken for pure ‘Palestrina’.

A pupil of William Byrd, Thomas Tomkins' technique as a contrapuntalist was second to none, as can be heard in the Great Service or the anthem O God, the proud are risen against me. In this respect alone he was the composer who most obviously continued Byrd's achievement.

The 1980 recording that not only made the Tallis Scholars a household name, but effectively led the way to today's great wave of exceptional mixed-voice choirs. Alison Stamp is faultless in the exceptionally testing soprano solo - top Cs and all - while, with the choir and solo quartet placed some distance apart, the perfect acoustic of Merton College Chapel is captured to perfection by Gimell.

Known in his lifetime as 'El cantor de Maria', Guerrero was second only to Victoria in Spanish renaissance music. His Marian motets are celebrated as some of the most beautiful compositions of the period: we include five of the best, including Ave virgo sanctissima, one of the most loved and imitated pieces of polyphony from any country.

The Tallis Scholars under director Peter Phillips have cultivated a cool, Apollonian sound in a cappella Renaissance vocal music that can be awe-inspiringly beautiful in Flemish polyphony, and especially in the spare English repertory for which they are named. This small, mixed-gender adult choir might not seem an ideal group to take on the darker hues of Tomás Luís de Victoria, but the set of Lamentations of Jeremiah recorded here, music for Holy Week, is quite well suited to their talents. As Phillips points out in his elegant notes (in English, German, and French), Victoria's "Spanish" style was largely forged in Rome, and his somberness was in many ways a personal rather than a national characteristic.