About this Artist

• Biography

Editorial Reviews

When this recording was released in 1980, it was justly hailed as one of the most sumptuously beautiful and gloriously spiritual recordings ever made. It was the first disc by Peter Philips and the Tallis Scholars -- a crackerjack English a cappella choir of 21 voices -- and in a single stroke it swept away decades of desiccated and etiolated English choral practice and replaced it with a lucidity, an intensity, and, above all, a sublimity that transformed the repertoire they sang. On this disc, they sang Gregorio Allegri's well-known "Miserere" and Giovanni Palestrina's well-loved "Missa Papae Marcelli" along with William Mundy's less well-known but no less loveable "Vox Patris caelestis" and they sang them with warmth, wonder, and unflagging beauty of tone. Recorded in Merton College Chapel in Oxford, the sheer sonic rapture of their sound was unparallel in its time and, 25 years later, it is still unequalled. Anyone interested in this repertoire in general or these pieces in particular, in choral singing in general or this group in particular, or simply interested in landmark in the history of recorded music, will love this disc. James Leonard, All Music Guide

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