CORONA SPINEA is Taverner's longest Mass and a liturgical curiosity. Its plainsong cantus firmus (placed in the tenor) has never been identified, but the title implies that it was written for the feast of the Crown of Thorns, a rare event in England. As usual with Tudor festal Masses, the Kyrie is not set. The four remaining movements are of roughly equal length. Each consists of sections from two to four voices in various combinations, punctuated by passages for the full six-part choir. Taverner's choir at Cardinal College had sixteen boys and twelve men. The present choir of Christ Church Cathedral numbers sixteen boys and thirteen men. These performances, given by a choir of virtually identical size and composition to Taverner's own, and recorded in the building where he worked during the most fruitful part of his life, are therefore of unusual historical interest.

El renombre de Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) y la extraordinaria calidad de su música, ha ensombrecido a grandes figuras de la polifonía española del esplendoroso siglo XVI. Un siglo que se iniciaba con maestros de la talla de Anchieta y Peñalosa, seguía con Morales y Guerrero para culminar con Victoria, Ambrosio Cotes y Alonso Lobo.
Este último es, sin duda, uno de los más grandes, y aunque no se implicó en las novedades aportadas por la naciente homofonía o la policoralidad del barroco, su arte supo asimilar las nuevas propuestas expresivas, siempre con un dominio de la trama vocal equiparable al de los mejores polifonistas de su época.

The Laudario di Cortona is a 13th c. manuscript consisting of a sequence of religious songs, simple and naive, after the praise songs, or lauds, of the poet and mystic Francis of Assisi. Lauds were in Italy a popular form of sacred singing quite separate from the Church's liturgy and its musical requirements. The music is a monody, occasionally sustained simply with a continuous note at the bass. It is quite distinct from Gregorian chant and foreshadows the tonalities of 14th and 15th c. Italian music.
Marcel Pérès contributed to working out the musicology of the Laudario as well as to providing some of the music with harmonic parts. The Estaing Salve Regina and the Chant de l'An Mille, or Prose de Montpellier, have been added to the Laudario di Cortona because they also pertained to the medieval mystery plays. The Chant illustrates the distressing approach to the Millenium 1000, with the associated threat that this world would come to an end.

Famous composers can cast long shadows. The attention paid to Palestrina in the four centuries since his death has meant the neglect of a substantial group of composers who were his contemporaries, or part of the following generation. If noted at all, they are lumped together as the ‘Roman School’ and assumed —though very little of their music has actually been heard— yoto have continued to write in the conservative style of Palestrina’s Masses. And yet the forty or so years between 1580 and 1620 saw a huge expansion in Roman musical activity and a consequent explosion of composition by native Italians attracted to the city. Each of these composers was an individual and, while much of their music did continue to develop the style of the later Palestrina, they also began to explore the new ground opened up, for example, by the advent of the basso continuo. This is certainly true of the Anerio brothers, Felice and Giovanni Francesco, born in the 1560s into a Roman musical family —their father, Maurizio, was a trombone player— and the music presented here, some of it being heard for the first time since the seventeenth century, should help make listeners aware of the riches waiting to be discovered in the works of these composers.

Ο οσιολογιώτατος Ιερομόναχος Ιερόθεος Τσονάκας κατάγεται εκ Πατρών Αχαιας, μονάζει εις την Ιεράν Μονήν Φιλοθέου Αγ. Ορους από του 1974.
Υπηρετει τήν Βυζαντινήν Μουσικήν Τέχνην και καταγράφει τήν Βνζαντινήν Μουσικήν Παράδοσιν και μάλιστα τήν Αγιορειτικήν.
Καρπός αυτής της Διακονίας είναι η συγγραφή καί η έκδοσις της γνωστής δωδεκατόμου σειράς: «ΑΘΩΝΙΚΗ ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ ΑΝΘΟΔΕΣΜΗ».
Η απόδοσις των βυζαντινών `Υμνων του παρόντος CD αποτελεί προσωπικήν επιλογήν του 'Ιδίου εκ προηγουμένων ηχογραφήσεων.
Ο οσιολογιώτατος 'Ιερομ. 'Ιερόθεος συνεχίζει την Διακονία του εις τόν χώρον τής Βυζαντινής Μουσικής Τέχνης μέ τήν χάριν του Θεού xαί τής Εφόρου του 'Αγίου 'Ορους Κυρίας Θεοτόκον.

St. Francis urged his followers to "go through the world preaching and praising God, … first one of them who knew how to preach should preach to the people and that after the sermon they were to sing the praises of God [[i]laudes domini] as minstrels of the Lord [[i]joculatores Dei]". This little Franciscan vignette conveys the new world of religious thought and feeling that would transform western religious practice in the burgeoning cities of medieval Europe: an active ministry that embraced the secular realm of urban laity, a vigorous new preaching style characterized by spontaneity and directness of expression, and an affective devotional environment that melded sermon, prayer, and song. The fate of this Franciscan legacy in the following centuries as it was adapted, extended, refined, reformed, institutionalized, and appropriated by clergy, laity, and other mendicant orders, is traced in the great textual and musical variety of the works included on this disk.

The anonymous Mass Cantate Domino for six voices (#1-4) is recorded in an incomplete set of part-books of about 1550, traditionally linked with Dunkeld Cathedral, but more likely originating in the collegiate chapel of Lincluden, Dumfriesshire. Much has had to be done to complete the music: the bass part is missing throughout and three other voices are more or less fragmentary towards the end. The style of the music is 'British decorative' of the earlier sixteenth century with its characteristic mixture of florid and imitative counterpoint. On closer examination, however, the work may be of Scottish origin: the music is directly related to the five-part Mass Fera pessima by Robert Carver, finest Scottish composer of sacred music in the early sixteenth century. I suggest that the present Mass is a reworking of about 1525 for six voices, possibly by Carver himself, of the earlier five-part composition: much thematic material is common to both works, though the six-part shows a more assured technical command. It is a cyclic Mass in the established tradition: each movement opens with the same head-motif and each is based on the same cantus firmus - a plainsong melody, as yet unidentified. Also, traditionally, the music has been arranged to alternate full and solo sections. It is an impressive work, and if by Carver - it is certainly very good Carver.

Carver's Mass Fera pessima for five voices of perhaps about 1525 has many stylistic affinities with the Mass L'Homme armé. It is another cantus firmus Mass (that is, one based on a recurring melody, often in longer notes and traditionally placed in the tenor), and it is also cyclic like the Mass for six voices in that each movement begins with a few bars of the same musical material.
Carver's Mass Pater creator omnium for four voices is precisely dated 1546 in the manuscript source. It is something of a curiosity, revealing on the one hand a desire by the composer to accommodate progressive ideas about clear word-setting and harmonic, chordal idioms, and on the other a reversal to his earlier decorative style. What music may have intervened between the Mass Fera pessima of about 1525 and this work is sadly lost, but may have revealed evidence of the radical stylistic changes that seem to have occurred.

Carver's Mass for six voices of about 1515 is constructed on the familiar pattern of clearly-defined sections for different combinations of voices. Those in six parts for full choir are weighty and sonorous, freely contrapuntal, but occasionally introducing imitative detail between the voices, and only very occasionally more solidly structural imitation. Individual parts are always beautifully shaped, constantly crossing within a wide range, and eminently singable, in spite of occasional harmonic constraints, and the overall effect is one of much sensuous sonority. And in the very last measures of the final Agnus Dei there is a wonderfully effective use of imitation at the same pitch.
Carver's Mass L'Homme armé for four voices of about 1520 follows the time-honoured practice of basing a musical composition on a pre-existing melodic 'scaffolding', as it were - in this case the famous French popular song much set by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European composers. Carver was in fact the only British composer to use it as the basis for the composition of a Mass. The text is set in the usual series of well-defined sections for four voices (full) alternating with those for three and two (solo). And while those for four are freely decorative, the solo sections are again often much more elaborate and contain imitative effects of detail between the voices

All Carver's surviving works are contained in a large manuscript choirbook assembled over several decades and now housed in the National Library of Scotland. According to various inscriptions Carver describes himself as "dominus", "canonicus de Scona" and three times "alias Arnat". New information has recently come to light regarding the date of birth and later period of activity of the composer's life'. It now appears that Carver was born in 1484/5 and was still living in 1568. In musical terms Carver's life spans the shift in Britain from the late medieval decorative style to the progressive and internationally current structural imitation of the High Renaissance that seems to have taken place in Scotland in the 1520s and 30s. Of course there were many intervening stages along the way, in Carver's case some even appearing alongside one another in the same work.

Psalms and troparia from the service of saints Athanasios and Ioasaph, founders of the Holy Monastery of Great Meteoron, sung by the Choir of chanters ‘The Maistores of the Psaltic Art’. Mostly by composers of the 18th and 19th c., among them Konstantinos Ptrotopsaltis (d. 1862), Petro Peloponnesios (d. 1778), Petros Byzantios (d. 1778) and Parthenion Meteoritis (end of the 18th c.).

Subtitled “Tales of Remarkable Women Throughout the Centuries “ this tribute to the fairer sex features an Irish lady pirate, a Portuguese queen, a Montenegrin mother, a French countess, a Jewish-American socialist, the Virgin Mary, and St. Ursula together with 11,000 other virgins are all featured on Faces of a Woman by Tapestry, the fourth release by these three talented women from New England. The ensemble covers broad musical territory ranging from Hildegard von Bingen’s mystical and contemplative songs to Rachmaninoff ’s pleasing "Tebye poyem" and to swinging rhythms, from medieval operatic drama to Balkan folklore and to modern music, from the artistry of the ars novato sailors’ songs and to the first American blues

Holy Saturday, two o'clock in the morning. In churches and chapels throughout Christendom, the Passion of Christ is commemorated at the Offices of Matins and Lauds. As this long and fatiguing liturgy advances, the candles are progressively extinguished, until total darkness reigns after the Miserere… This dramatic tableau is that of the Office of Tenebrae, a ceremonial unchanged since the Middle Ages which inspired some of the most moving pieces in the whole sacred repertory, notably settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah - which under the name of 'Leçons de ténèbres' were to become a major genre of French Baroque music. In the sixteenth century, at the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the service was sung to the Lamentations of Cristóbal de Morales (1500-53), the 'light of Spain' who himself became a singer in this illustrious establishment. It is this magnificent, uniquely compelling music that Doulce Mémoire use as the basis for a new liturgical reconstruction, following on from their Requiem pour les Rois de France . As Denis Raisin-Dadre says: This music speaks to us of time, of time that is immobile, contemplative, extraordinarily concentrated… We have striven to recapture the emotion it engendered, its spirituality, through a search for absolute sincerity.

PIERRE DE LA RUE fait partie des grands de notre histoire musicale. Il est l'un des maîtres les plus considérables de «l'école néerlandaise». Sur le plan de l'envergure, de la profondeur et des capacités formelles, il soutient parfaitement la comparaison avec les autres grands noms de la génération de JOSQUIN DES PRES que sont OBRECHT, ISAAC et BRUMEL. Cette période correspondait, il est vrai, à un apogée tout particulier de la musique polyphonique. Dans un de ses discours, MARTIN LUTHER s'exclame : «Ah! Combien d'excellents musiciens sont morts en dix ans ! Josquin, Pierre de La Rue, Finch et tant d'autres artistes remarquables».

Il Codice consta di 101 carte munite di tre distinte filigrane, la più antica delle quali risponde ad un tipo assai diffuso in Piemonte circa fra il 1420 e il 1475, mentre la più recente si può far risalire ai primi decenni del Cinquecento. Le composizioni - tutte a 3 o a 4 voci (salvo una che è a 2 voci) - sono complessivamente 49: 8 messe (fra cui una pro defunctis), 11 Magnificat, 14 mottetti di varia natura (inni, antifone, Salve Regina, ecc.), 2 Benedictus, 12 chansons, 1 canone enigmatico, 1 brano strumentale. Solamente per 19 di tali composizioni si conosce il nome dell'autore, il più delle volte individuato attraverso il confronto con altre fonti, e fra questi figurano Alexander Agricola, Loyset Compère, Hayne van Ghizeghem, Heinrich Isaac, Antoine de Fevin, Jacob Obrecht, Antoine Brumel e un «misterioso» Engarandus Juvenis - un nome presente esclusivamente nel Codice di Staffarda, autore di una Missa pro defunctis e di un Magnificat a 4 voci, nonchè di un Salve Regina a 3 voci -, tutti scomparsi fra la fine del XV secolo e i primi due decenni del XVI.