Tallis / Byrd / Taverner / Parsons / Sheppard / Mundy: In The Midst Of Life – Contrapunctus

   in Early Music Today (Jun, 2015)
This searingly beautiful album is the first installment of a new recording project by Contrapunctus reconstructing and exploring repertoire from the famous Baldwin Partbooks, an important preserve of Latin-texted music spanning several generations of Tudor composers. Each album will explore a different religious theme: in this present case, mortality. Happily, such themes provide a structure through which to hear lesser-known works alongside those now firmly established in the early music ‘canon’. For instance, this disc contains both John Sheppard’s well-known and vast antiphon ‘Media Vita’, and Dericke Gerarde’s delightful but lesser-known ‘Sive vigilem’, both wonderfully expressive settings.

Throughout the disc, Contrapunctus offer some of the most unreservedly beautiful performances of Tudor …