Blue Heron - Vol 2 Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks: Missa Regnum mundi - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

'But what polyphony this is! Even as a hardened reviewer and performer/director of polyphony (including several mass settings by Ludford), I was transported by the exquisite beauty of this Mass, and found myself sitting in semi-darkness luxuriating in the genius of Ludford's intertwining vocal lines. Pygott's enormous Salve regina, running in this recording to almost 23 minutes of intricate polyphony, is in the more conservative idiom of the Eton Choirbook and is given an equally intelligent and exquisitely unhurried performance. I cannot recommend this superb CD highly enough - it is the sort of recording to listen to in awe at the sustained and unerring skill of the performers and the burgeoning brilliance of the composers (and their unobtrusive editor), and to shed a quiet tear for the untold treasures that have been lost.' --- D. James Ross, Early Music Review (UK), October 2012 InchThis album and it's predecessor...are the beginning of an exciting series, more than hinting at the wealth of great sacred music written by English composers between roughly 1500 and 1540...top marks in all respects engineering, liner notes-by the group's director, Scott Metcalfe-and, of course, the performances themselves.Inch --Barry Brenesal, Fanfare, Sept./Oct. 2012 The second installment in Blue Heron's 5-CD series of Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks features Nicholas Ludford's radiant Missa Regnum mundi, sung in a musical context like that of it's probable original occasion, a festal mass for St Margaret, with plainchant items from the Proper according to the Use of Salisbury. The disc concludes with Richard Pygott's extraordinary Salve regina, one of the longest votive antiphons extant and a marvel of rhetorical expression. This is the world premiere recording of all the music on the disc. The scholar David Skinner has called Ludford Inchone of the last unsung geniuses of Tu