Josquin Desprez: Missa Malheur me bat & Missa Fortuna desperata

The Tallis Scholars have been performing the music of Josquin regularly in concert for over 20 years. Their 1986 CD of his music remains the only recording of Early Music to have won the Gramophone Record of the Year Award. This new release is the fourth CD in The Tallis Scholars’ projected Complete Josquin Mass Cycle.

“It has recently become a favourite intellectual game to compare Josquin’s career with that of Beethoven. Essentially the point is that Josquin was as influential a composer in his time as Beethoven was in his; but the subplot is that Josquin ought to be taken as seriously as any later composer even though he lived so long ago and only wrote for voices. These Mass-settings are two of the finest to come from any pen.” Peter Phillips

Peter Phillip’s pre-eminently clear-sighted direction… may carry with it a certain detachment, but the architecture of Josquin’s edifices is allowed to emerge untrammelled by well-meaning expressive accretions, and to speak for itself with a directness and intellectual power that compels from first note to last. — BBC Music Magazine, March 2009, 4 out of 5 stars