Allegri: Miserere; Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli; Mundy: Vox Patris Caelestis
Specially remastered in High Resolution.
For the original CD release click here.
Chosen by BBC Music Magazine as one of the 50 Greatest Recordings of all time and widely regarded as the finest recording of Allegri's Miserere, this landmark recording made on 22nd March 1980 in Merton College Chapel, Oxford, set new standards for the performance and recording of unaccompanied sacred music.
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.
Jeremy Pound
Heartstoppingly Beautiful
Andrew McGregor
BBC Radio 3 Record Review - 21 March 2020
Many recordings have long ago been digitised using the standards of the day and the masters lost or destroyed, or were simply recorded digitally at CD quality in the first place, and that's all there is. So while it may seem perverse to be going back to pre-CD recordings as a source for high-resolution releases, in many cases - at least where the analogue master tapes still exist - that's the remastering engineer's best bet at coming up with something 'beyond CD'.
We've seen that a lot of late in the rock music field ... and the results can be spectacular. That's certainly the case with one of the most recent reissues to come my way, Gimell's 40th-anniversary high-resolution release of one of its first recordings, The Tallis Scholars' 1980 reading of Allegri's Miserere in the Chapel of Merton College, Oxford. In the 192kHz/24-bit release, the recording sounds spectacularly fresh, showing just what today's hi-resolution formats can do with fine sound from the past.
Andrew Everard
Gramophone - June 2020
