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Track(s) taken from CDH55086

Videte miraculum

composer
author of text
Responsory at First Vespers, Feast of the Purification (Candlemas)

The Sixteen, Harry Christophers (conductor)
Recording details: August 1988
All Hallows, Gospel Oak, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Antony Howell
Release date: July 1989
Total duration: 8 minutes 35 seconds
 

Reviews

‘For a wallow in the richest cream of English Reformation church music you couldn't do much better than this’ (Early Music Review)

‘Intense brilliance and utter serenity … altogether glorious’ (The Times)
Vox patris and Videte miraculum (another form, the Respond with its plainsong ‘cantus firmus’ base, now going out of fashion) were almost certainly written in the reign of Mary. Latin was still used for services later, certainly in Elizabeth’s own Chapel Royal, and Latin music published, thanks to the queen’s dispensation of a monopoly, in Tallis and Byrd’s 1575 Cantiones Sacrae. Thus to use the language at all did not in itself imply recusancy, but Mundy may well have retained Catholic sympathies. His early, Marian anthem Exsurge Christe, very unusual for its time in setting non-liturgical words, is a prayer against heresy, and pleads for the confounding of schismatics; his son John, who succeeded Merbecke as organist of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 1585, wrote an overtly pro-Roman setting of the Lamentations (though not even this would have to imply treason—the queen could describe the Earl of Worcester, one of Byrd’s patrons, as ‘a stiff papist and a good subject’).

from notes by Nicolas Robertson © 1989

Other albums featuring this work

The Sixteen & The Golden Age of English Polyphony
CDS44401/1010CDs Boxed set (at a special price) — Download only
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