New Tallis CD release
Tallis: Lamentations and other sacred music
The group’s latest recording project on the Hyperion label, due out on April 29 2016, is the last but one in the series of the complete sacred music of Thomas Tallis and includes the Lamentations of Jeremiah, Dum transisset Sabbatum, Salvator mundi I and the Te Deum ‘for meanes’ in ‘superlative performances’.
“Ten English composers set the Latin text of the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the mid-16th century, in the reigns both of the Catholic Queen Mary and the Protestant Elizabeth I. Precise details are hard to establish of when works were performed, as Andrew Carwood explains in an illuminating note to this disc, but there seems little doubt that Tallis, though a Catholic, wrote his masterpiece for Elizabeth. The repeated final lines, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn to the Lord your God”, unforgettable once heard, have a dark resonance here, thanks to the sonorous basses of the Cardinall’s Musick (Robert Macdonald, Simon Whiteley). The rest of this fine recording draws on music from across Tallis’s career, with English and Latin settings (Sancte Deus, Te Deum, Come, Holy Ghost and more). The singers reach the highest standards.”
Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian (April 17 2016)