Standing somewhat aside from the flood of recordings treating Renaissance music in context are the performances of the Tallis Scholars, a cappella renditions of the monuments of Renaissance sacred polyphony. The masses of Josquin are the great intellectual accomplishments of the period. Director Peter Phillips, in his booklet notes, compares Josquin to Beethoven, pointing to the way each of Josquin's masses, like Beethoven's symphonies, seems to define and inhabit its own particular world. A closer comparison in many ways ...
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Standing somewhat aside from the flood of recordings treating Renaissance music in context are the performances of the Tallis Scholars, a cappella renditions of the monuments of Renaissance sacred polyphony. The masses of Josquin are the great intellectual accomplishments of the period. Director Peter Phillips, in his booklet notes, compares Josquin to Beethoven, pointing to the way each of Josquin's masses, like Beethoven's symphonies, seems to define and inhabit its own particular world. A closer comparison in many ways would be Bach: the polyphonic works of both composers have attractive surfaces that conceal a wealth of inner relationships deep enough to keep you searching, if you so choose, for years to find them all. There are limpid crowd-pleasers among Josquin's masses and especially among his motets and secular works, but these two parody masses -- masses built on multipart models -- aren't really among them; they involve intricate derivation of the individual parts from the material of the...
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Add this copy of Josquin: Masses to cart. $27.87, new condition, Sold by Revaluation Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Exeter, DEVON, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2009 by HYPERION RECORDS.