English Tudor music of Byrd, Tallis, Taverner and Sheppard features on this disc by Contrapunctus, founded in 2010 with 10 singers directed by Owen Rees. It’s the first of a series of Latin polyphony from the Baldwin partbooks, an anthology of around 170 works compiled mainly in the 1570s. (John Baldwin was a tenor lay clerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, first under Elizabeth I then James I.) Borrowing its title from the openings of the Nunc dimittis, the subject here is mortality and fear of the Day of Judgment. Rees’s accompanying notes tell a fascinating story of the survival of these partbooks. Whether you listen in Lenten penitence or in general hope of spiritual balm, the message is universal, the singing superb.
