Thomas Tallis: Songs Of Reformation – Alamire

   in Early Music Today (Dec, 2017)
David Skinner and Alamire complete their trilogy of discs of music associated with Henry VIII’s wives with this all-Tallis offering. The repertoire is all glorious, of course, but three items are the cornerstones of the disc: the opening Gaude gloriosa Dei mater; the closing Se lord and behold (a contrafactum setting of the former to words – paraphrasing the angriest words of the psalmist, in the vernacular, for the purposes of rousing the populace into support for Henry’s war effort – settled by Skinner to have been by Katherine Parr) and the Litany in Archbishop Cranmer’s 1544 translation, published as a companion piece, in a setting previously attributed to Parsons. …