Peter Philips was an English composer who spent his career outside of England: he traveled to Italy, where he absorbed both the pure Counter Reformation style of Palestrina and, apparently, the polychoral style of Venice. By the time he planned to return, the situation of English Catholics was dire, so he fled to the Low Countries and apparently spent the rest of his life there, harassed occasionally by English agents but managing, in Dutch, to talk his way out of trouble. He has never fit neatly into the categories of ...
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Peter Philips was an English composer who spent his career outside of England: he traveled to Italy, where he absorbed both the pure Counter Reformation style of Palestrina and, apparently, the polychoral style of Venice. By the time he planned to return, the situation of English Catholics was dire, so he fled to the Low Countries and apparently spent the rest of his life there, harassed occasionally by English agents but managing, in Dutch, to talk his way out of trouble. He has never fit neatly into the categories of music history, and he is known mostly for keyboard music. These eight-part motets of 1613, separated from the mainstream of musical and liturgical history, are not often performed, and their mere presence is really the main attraction here. They lie right in between Philips' Italian models, with the sober, text-centered approach of Palestrina applied to a variety of big antiphonal structures. These in turn are treated with great variety here by conductor Rupert Gough and the Choir of...
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