Peter Philips and Richard Dering make a happy coupling, as this disc of neatly paired settings of similar texts demonstrates. Both were English Catholics who lived and worked in the Spanish Netherlands during the early years of the seventeenth century, and both produced choral music that gently combined that region's inherent conservatism with elements of the up-to-date Italian style of the day. Philips was the elder by about 20 years, and his music is on the whole grander (employing double-choir techniques in the large-scale pieces) and more contrapuntally elaborate; Dering's musical language is more harmonically conceived by comparison, with a direct and straightforward mode of expression that perhaps explains why it was reportedly favoured by Oliver Cromwell. Neither composer is well represented on disc as a vocal composer (though Philips is relatively familiar through his keyboard works), and this release therefore provides a significant opportunity to make their further acquaintance.
The Choir of King's College, Cambridge, delivers intelligent performances of this music with Stephen Cleobury consistently encouraging lively rhythms and alert responses to its shifts of mood and drawing an impressive, typically Kingsian sound in the more expansive choral moments. In more texturally complex passages, however, things are rather let down by the uncertainty of the boys' voices, a weakness which is hardly disguised by their forwardness in the recorded balance. With the men obviously singing out fairly forcefully in the background a satisfactory blend is difficult, while in the motets for solo voices and continuo, in which such an adjustment is not possible, the expressiveness of their singing is inhibited by the need to avoid drowning out the boys. This is a worthwhile and thoughtfully realized recording of music that certainly deserves a hearing, but in the end some more assured singing might have made it a bit more fulfilling.'