Chapelle du Roi
The Complete Works - Volume 7
- Type CD
- Label Signum Classics
- UPC 0635212002926
- Catalog number SIGCD 029
- Release date 01 April 2004
About the album
Queen Elizabeth’s reign (1558-1603) was a golden age for the arts. England enjoyed a growing cultural exchange with continental Europe. England’s rich, but essentially conservative pre-Reformation heritage was infused with increasing continental influence and innovations.
Elizabeth I was the fourth monarch to sit on the throne in Thomas Tallis’s lifetime. From the outset of her reign Elizabeth allowed considerable freedom of practice and belief. She was firmly in favour of a vernacular liturgy for the general population, although in her own chapels she preferred a more lavish ceremony to music.
Tallis had witnessed the wholesale destruction of much of England’s church music tradition, however the ever adaptable composer met the challenges of a new liturgy, its new styles and genres, with the imaginative force of a man half his age.
The years of Reformation, and Elizabeth’s protestant settlement, freed the Latin-texted tradition of liturgical propriety, allowing composers to reinvigorate the language and harness it to new, expressive and personal ends. This recording presents Tallis’s Elizabethan Latin motets (which number fifteen). The mighty occasional piece, the forty-voice motet Spem in alium, concludes the album.
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11Salvator mundi I
02:19 -
12O sacrum convivium
03:15 -
13In manus tuas
01:51 -
14O nata lux de lumine
01:54 -
15Absterge Domine
05:31 -
16Discomfort them O Lord
04:37 -
17Domine, quis habitabit
08:29 -
18Laudate Dominum
04:04 -
19Miserere nostri
02:18 -
110Salvator mundi II
02:21 -
111Mihi autem nimis
02:15 -
112O salutaris hostia
02:08 -
113In ieiunio et fletu (Low)
03:59 -
114In ieiunio et fletu (High)
03:18 -
115Derelinquat impius
03:49 -
116Spem in alium
10:03