Lassus is the most wide-ranging and versatile of all sixteenth-century composers; but on record he has never had quite the success of his contemporaries Palestrina and Byrd. That may be partly because some of his music does not so easily jump off the page and has had more than its share of unimaginative, workaday performances.
Perhaps there is no better example of that than the assortment of pieces presented by the Alsfelder Vocal Ensemble. The record's importance is in the four Italian madrigals, which are still not available in a modern edition because the tenor partbook was long considered lost, though a copy has now turned up in Dublin. But, given the enormous quantity of unperformed Lassus, the recovery of some more madrigals is in itself of no great moment. Moreover these stolid performances by a largish chorus, sluggish, colourless and extremely short on distinguishable consonants, do little to argue the composer's merit. Certainly the motets fare rather better under this kind of treatment; and the grand six-voice Gloria Patri goes particularly well. But this is a record strictly for those who wish to have as much Lassus as possible, whatever the nature of its performance.
The record by the Munich Vocal Soloists is another matter, not least because it juxtaposes the astonishing Prophetiae Sibyllarum with some of the no less extraordinary moresche—all works probably written before Lassus was 20, and all of them plainly masterpieces of the highest order. By using solo singers, Hans-Ludwig Hirsch manages to give the music some of the freedom that it needs. Perhaps the Prophetiae Sibyllarum are less satisfactory: to add a harpsichord continuo to these often highly chromatic pieces inevitably leads to difficulties of intonation and restricts the palette of vocal colour offered by the music. Some of the mystery is lost. But the moresche work superbly: here there is wit, considerable musical fluidity, an imaginative approach to the manifold changes of mood in the polyphony, and some glorious singing. The instrumental ensemble add considerably to the vitality of the performance; and at last we get some glimpse of why Lassus's works were so successful in their own time.'