It will take quite something to displace James Wood's Amon Ra recording of the Mass Hercules dux Ferrariae from my affections: it positively glitters and bursts with energy, just the kind of thing to persuade the cautious that Josquin is one of the world's most invigorating composers. But then the Hilliard Ensemble have quite something to offer: not just years of experience with early polyphony and a line-up much closer to what Josquin might have expected, but more skilled singing than a semi-professional chamber choir can muster. Theirs is a gentler reading that stops to enjoy and ruminate on many small details of the score. Briefly, they make the Mass less instantly attractive but in several ways richer. They also present a new and infinitely more convincing resolution of the three-out-of-one canon in the second Agnus Dei (provided by Professor Willem Elders of Utrecht). So if Wood's version retains its place of honour on my shelf, the Hilliard Ensemble neatly complement it by offering an entirely different view of the piece. As one of Josquin's most miraculously rounded achievements, the Mass merits two versions in any good collection.
Morever, in their 'fillers' the Hilliard aim for the very top: the six-voice Pater noster/Ave Maria, quite possibly his last work and certainly one of his boldest; and the five-voice Miserere, which Edward Lowinsky once claimed to be music's equivalent of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Both may have been taken a little too slowly. Normally I tend to feel that in this kind of music the slower you go the better. But in the Pater noster several singers appear to be in uncomfortable ranges, and the result has a slight wind-box effect. And the Miserere, clocking up nearly 19 minutes, rather loses momentum: the only other recording of it I know, under Philippe Herreweghe on Harmonia Mundi, albeit less well sung, brings it down to just over 15 minutes, which may be nearer the mark.
The record also includes a slightly rocky performance of a gloriously impassioned motet that has occasionally passed for Josquin, the eight-voice Lugebat David probably by Gombert. And it ends with the best performance of the lot, a miraculously turned reading of Josquin's presumably early Tu solus qui facis mirabilia.'