Four years ago two excellent recordings of the Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas were issued in quick succession, by The Sixteen under Harry Christophers (Hyperion—LP only) and by The Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips (Gimell). There was not much to choose between them except that Phillips was rather more passionate and Christophers concentrated more on getting the details right: after the reviews were published I discovered that they had used virtually the same singers. Nearly half of these singers now turn up again in Andrew Parrott's version of the work.
Parrott's approach is of course considerably harder-edged. The acoustic is dryer and the rhythms are sharper, with the result that you get rather less impression of an incense-laden preReformation collegiate. Particularly satisfying here is the crystal sharpness of some of the solo singing (though I myself continue to take extraordinary pleasure in the admittedly somewhat mannered singing of The Tallis Scholars' soprano soloist). Parrott also works much harder to make all six parts clearly audible: if there is less sense of Taverner's wonderful long-limbed melodic invention there is considerably more evidence of his astonishingly detailed counterpoint.
In his note on the performance Parrott makes a considerable (and, in the circumstances, perhaps over-confident) issue of the misleadingly high transpositions now often used for this repertory; so he performs the work only a semitone above modern pitch, whereas Phillips had it a tone up and Christophers a minor third. In a grand and glorious work like this, patently exploiting to the limit all the resources of a first-rate choir, these differences may seem important. But a much more important decision is which lines are sung by what we would call tenors, which by falsettists and which by boys (represented in all three records by women). Parrott, as in his other records, refuses to believe that falsettists were used. And in this particular work, performed in this pitch-range, it seems clear that he is right to use tenors on lines for which the other two conductors have included male altos. His decision is very much to the benefit of the textural clarity—though I believe that it would probably have sounded even better with these particular voices if he had taken it up a further semitone to Phillips's pitch.
Taverner's work is here set within a plainchant Mass for Trinity Sunday, assembled by Paul Fugler and sung by a 13-man schola largely independent of the 22-voice polyphonic choir. The pronunciation of the Latin follows historical principles proposed by Harold Copeman and sounds convincing.'