Virgin And Child: Music From The Baldwin Partbooks – Contrapunctus

   in Early Music Today (Jun, 2017)
The history of music is grateful to the obscure Elizabethan and Jacobean tenor layclerk John Baldwin, who in the 1570s and 1580s copied around 170 works into a single set of six partbooks preserved at Christ Church Oxford. Many of them are pre-Reformation Latin scores and eight of those dedicated to the Virgin Mary comprise this second disc focused on the Baldwin books by the group Contrapunctus under conductor-musicologist Owen Rees. Some reconstruction is involved, as one of the books, ironically Baldwin’s tenor part, is missing, but there is no sense of incompleteness in the performance. Superb artistry coupled with informed scholarship is a Contrapunctus hallmark.

They open with Tallis’ Gaude …