It’s always a pleasure to see the Tallis Scholars live. That twelve voices can fill a huge cavern like Duke Chapel with glorious sound is quite astonishing, really.

The program of music by Mouton, Cornysh (the elder), and Browne was a fine one. It’s nice to hear Mouton’s music beyond the sublime “Nesciens Mater”; and Cornysh’s music highlights the immense differences between music being written on the continent and in England in the early 16th Century. The Browne “Salve Regina” helped demonstrate that, while Mouton and Cornysh wrote very fine music, Browne wrote great music and should be considered one of the very great English composers of that or any age.

It’s also nice to see (and hear) the Tallis Scholars sing the early English music at a lower pitch than in the past. This was true, too, of Tallis’s “O Nata Lux”, which was the welcome encore. It sounds much better to my ears without a piercingly high soprano line.

Bottom line here is that the Tallis Scholars are better than ever. Peter Phillips has changed with the times in his understanding of the music he presents and in his presentation of it. His Josquin mass cycle is timely and important. I only hope that he will record some of the masses that are not securely in the Josquin canon (like, say, the “Quem dicunt homines”.