Taverner's six-voice Mass Gloria tibi Trinitas is surely one of the finest masterpieces of early Tudor music and, as the source of the original ''In nomine'' that generated reams of further pieces in the Elizabethan era and after, it may also count as the most influential work of its generation. So there is a very good reason for giving it early priority in the transfer of music to CD.
Of the two recent issues of the work (the other, on LP only, features The Sixteen on Hyperion), this one is perhaps less clean in all details but musically more exciting, as I tried to argue in my earlier review—to which I have nothing more to add, if only because, try as I might, I cannot hear any difference whatsoever between the excellent pressing of the LP and the new CD. Where the excitement of the singing covered details, it does so here too; and, it is good to be able to report, the occasional precarious moments in the performance sounded no more precarious here. Perhaps younger ears will hear an improvement in the clarity; but my own inclination is to value the reissue on CD purely because it is so much easier to handle and less fragile.
If there were to be a mild misgiving it would be simply that the engineers could have used the banding facility of the CD more imaginatively and made it possible to locate particular passages within a movement. One must commend their inclusion of a band entitled ''Ambience'' at the beginning of the disc; but as a teacher I can imagine wanting to play, for example, just the famous ''In nomine''; and while this is in any case infinitely easier on CD than on any other medium, it could so easily have been easier still.'