Tye: The Peterhouse Mass & Other Works – Cinquecento

The Peterhouse Mass recorded here survives in partbooks found in the Cambridge college of the same name; the missing tenor part has been reconstructed by Paul Doe. In The Peterhouse Mass, we sense that Tye’s harmonic language was moving away from modes towards keys. The Mass is formally written in Dorian transposed to G, but is effectively in G minor. Here, Tye’s part-writing is sometimes more that of a keyboard player than of a singer. For example, at the words ‘consubstantialem Patri’ in the Credo, he moves from an A major to a D minor triad, causing an unsingerly leap of a diminished fourth in the second contratenor. The homophony of the final Agnus Dei is also strongly reminiscent of keyboard style.

Christopher Tye is less famous than his Tudor contemporary Thomas Tallis and his documented life more chaotic, but the calibre of his Masses and polyphony are unsurpassed for colour, full-textured fabric and interwoven melodic lines. Tye successfully negotiated the perilous politics of an era when successive monarchs, from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, pulled England back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism, and demanded that church music bend accordingly.

The music may be English but the five members of Cinquecento (literally ’16th century’ in Italian) are pan-European, each bringing a lifetime of early music experience to forgotten masterpieces. This is their 17th album for Hyperion: ‘Tye: The Peterhouse Mass & other works’.