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Partituren
Fascinating music, which immediately opens up to the listener even if he knows nothing of the polyphonic artifice which Josquin has deployed.
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Goldberg
flawless intonation, crystal-clear voicing and a remarkable balance between emotional expressivity and cool intellectualism
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Audiophile Audition
It is becoming almost impossible to objectively review a Tallis Scholars recording.
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The Age, Melbourne
It is a remarkable acheivement that 35 years after its founding The Tallis Scholars should still be a leader in the field of Renaissance polyphony.
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Classical.net
It's not necessary to know that mist is composed of water droplets. Yet Phillips and the Tallis Scholars do know this. And such refinement refreshes anyone who would wash away the dust. Now almost 35 years old, the Tallis Scholars have managed to open this music – successfully and unhesitatingly. Buy this wonderful CD!
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classicstoday.com
Artistic Quality 10/10 - Sound Quality 10/10. Top marks for The Tallis Scholars latest release.
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International Record Review
The Tallis Scholars, with their crystalline clarity and superb intonation, are ideal interpreters of this at times impossibly complex music.
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Gravely beautiful pieces


16 April 2008
The Guardian
Andrew Clements

Josquin's only two masses based entirely on canons make an obvious coupling, yet they apparently date from the opposite ends of his composing career. In fact, as Peter Phillips suggests in his fascinating sleeve notes, the Missa Sine Nomine may have been composed as a companion piece to the earlier Missa Ad Fugam, just so that Josquin could demonstrate how much more accomplished his canonic writing had become in his later career, and how his mastery at the end of his life was more than a match for that of his teacher, Johannes Ockeghem. In the Missa Ad Fugam, the canonic writing is always between the top part and the third, with the two lines always a fifth apart, though the distance between the successive entities varies from movement to movement. In the Sine Nomine, the canonic writing is far freer, with individual lines forming and re-forming connections with others as the work goes on. It's intricate but fascinating to unravel, and both masses are gravely beautiful pieces, unfolded with wonderful clarity and purity of tone by Phillips's eight-voice choir.


Reproduced from The Guardian






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