Puer Natus Est Nobis / Responsories / Motets

Description

The English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis is part of the DNA of the Choir of New College Oxford, an ensemble founded in 1379, long before the composer’s birth. Tallis lived to an advanced age, under the reign of four monarchs, and was admired for his impeccable technique. Yet his music is not limited to a magnificent finished product; it is also of great expressive power. Works such as Suscipe quaeso Domine bear witness to a striking spiritual fervour and treatment of the text. His mastery of the cantus firmus finds its most accomplished expression in the central work of this album, the Mass “Puer natus est nobis”, a highly sophisticated seven-voice composition, performed here by boys and adults. Other pieces in the programme highlight Tallis’s innovation and diversity: O nata lux, Salvator mundi and the extraordinary In jejunio et fletu. Tallis moved within a sound world of his own – shaped by the voices and technique of young choristers and adult singers – so much so that Byrd could declare after his death: “Tallis is dead, and music dies with him.”