BBC Radio 3 Record Review - Building a Library - 27 February 2021

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In a special edition of BBC Radio 3's "Building a Library", this recording was chosen to sum up the genius of Josquin in his 500th Anniversary year.

 

"Peter Phillips absolutely lives this music and with The Tallis Scholars you get clarity of texture, exquisite phrasing and a luminosity of tone that is second to none." Elin Manahan Thomas

"The perfect combination of forensically beautiful singing and warmth and mastering of tone, timbre and expression." Hannah French (BBC Record Review Extra)

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Gramophone - James Jolly - October 2008

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"As our awards enter their fourth decade, we've paused and looked back over the first 30 years. It's gratifying to see how many of the recordings singled out for the prestigious Record of the Year have gone on to become classics of the catalogue. One thinks of Sir Charles Mackerras's Janacek operas, or Karajan's still-astounding Mahler Ninth, or one of the most heart-warming of all recordings of an entire oeuvre - the Beaux Arts Trio in Haydn's piano trios. Then there are the discs that shaped careers - violinists Nigel Kennedy (in Elgar) and Maxim Vengerov (in Prokofiev and Shostakovich) - to which you might add The Tallis Scholars' stunning disc of Masses by Josquin Desprez, a disc that elevated Early Music to the "mainstream"."

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The Josquin Companion (page 633), Oxford University Press - Peter Urquhart

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The Tallis Scholars are arguably the best choir ever to record the repertoire of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. They come from a long tradition of excellent English choirs, the background to which is formed by the choral foundations of Oxford, Cambridge, and the English cathedrals, which support choirs of men and boys. Professional ensembles that developed in the 1960s and 1970s replaced the boys with falsettists, while the Tallis Scholars took the step of using women on the top lines instead of men or boys. The result is a choir whose tuning, ensemble, and general presentation are nearly flawless, and whose recordings are widely perceived as definitive. The praise is justified, but with the idea of definitive recordings lies a danger ...

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