Taverner, J.: Missa Corona Spinea & Dum Transiss

   in Early Music Today (Sep, 2015)
Prepare to leave Planet Earth for the duration of Taverner’s Missa Corona spinea. Even the most diehard of the Tallis Scholars’ supporters who thought they’d heard everything by now will be bowled over by this astonishing performance of an astonishing work. Whatever the occasion of the Mass’s first performance – possibly an event at Wolsey’s Cardinal College, Oxford in front of Henry VIII – the choir must have been extraordinary. The Tallis Scholars – as we would expect – here keep this fiendishly difficult work under immaculate, apparently nerveless, control.

Most especially the thrills come from the high-wire act performed by the Scholars’ treble voices, Janet Coxwell and Amy Haworth. …