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To celebrate their 25th anniversary, sacred music specialists the Tallis Scholars re-released on their own Gimell label a disc that has been a cipher in their catalog for a long time, English Madrigals, recorded in 1982 for EMI's Classics for Pleasure imprint and unavailable for so long as to be virtually forgotten. It is heartening to see the list of singers active under Peter Philips' direction in that bygone era -- Emily van Evera, Margaret Philpot, Michael Chance, and Andrew King among them -- all names unknown in 1982 that have figured very prominently in the early music boom soon to follow. As the original Classics for Pleasure LP, though digitally recorded, ran short by twenty-first century standards, Gimell has expanded it through including the odd pieces used to fill out an early release, Tomkins: The Great Service.

As one comes to expect from the Tallis Scholars in music of a more serious kind, the performances of the English Madrigals are terrific; in the notes, Philips states that their ultimate single-mindedness might have slackened somewhat "if there hadn't been so much first-rate sacred music to explore." And admittedly, sacred literature suits them better; while these acoustically dry, one-to-a-part performances of madrigals by late sixteenth and early seventeenth century English composers are profoundly professional realizations of these pieces. However, one expects to hear the Tallis Scholars out in the cathedral, in a "wet" acoustic and blending as an ensemble -- that is their "home." We get some sense of that in the Tomkins pieces appended, though not as much as in their superb Allegri: Miserere disc that has also witnessed reissue as part of the 25th anniversary program from Gimell, not to mention many of the other landmark Tallis Scholars releases that have appeared since 1980.

The Tallis Scholars have been with us so long that it is hard to imagine what the early music scene would be like without them. The re-release of English Madrigals is interesting in that it provides a backward glimpse of a place where the Tallis Scholars have been, a step along the way taken during their very beginnings that they are unlikely to revisit. Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide

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