Tallis: The English Anthems

"Ever since their first record, some ten years ago, Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars have devoted much of their best music-making to the works of Tallis himself; and they have made earlier recordings of some of the pieces here. But there are several reasons why it made sense to present Tallis's complete surviving English 'anthems' as a unit. Among the large quantity of somewhat formalized music that was composed for the earliest years of the English church, these works stand out as astonishingly vital and varied; and the spate of Tallis records issued over the past few decades has propelled him into the position of a composer whose every note can be treasured as an important and vibrant component of our musical heritage. He may have left far fewer works than Byrd or even Sheppard, but the intensity and richness of his musical message is everywhere present in what survives, even in the works that look relatively simple on paper - which, by and large, means the pieces recorded here.

"Moreover, Peter Phillips really has the measure of the music. That appears not only in the phrasing and the tempos, but also in the balance and the pitch levels at which he chooses to perform the music - chosen less according to the formulas which used to be so much in fashion, but more in line with the needs of the singers he chooses to employ. Briefly stated, a record that looks a little forbidding turns out to be riveting from end to end. There may be a slight disappointment for some in that women are used where boys would have been more appropriate, there is no attempt at appropriate pronunciation of the texts and little evidence of awareness that hymn-tunes and ensemble songs, for example, demand quite different kinds of singing. But everything is so elegantly done and so persuasive that the record positively compels you to return to it again and again." David Fallows (Gramophone, December 1986)