Album review: Stile Antico, The Phoenix Rising (Harmonia Mundi)

The Phoenix Rising is a programme of works collated in the 1920s publication of Tudor Church Music by the Carnegie UK Society, which proved hugely influential in popularising this choral form through the last century. Exquisitely rendered by the Stile Antico consort, the works range chronologically from John Taverner's “O Splendor Gloriae”, in which the Eton Choirbook style is still audible, to Orlando Gibbons' “O Clap Your Hands Together”, where Psalm 47 is brilliantly set in a cascade of repetitions thatdevelops intense hypnoticpower. The various sections of William Byrd's “Mass for Five Voices” are interspersed among works by Thomas Tallis, Thomas Morley and Robert White.

Download: O Clap Your Hands Together; Christe Qui Lux es et Dies; Mass for Five Voices; O Splendor Gloriae