Four excellent modern recordings of this work in the catalogue could seem an embarras de richesses, but the fact is that Victoria’s swan-song is the kind of music which is all things to all men, and consequently able to survive the most diverse kinds of performance. Magnificat’s recording, as one would expect from a professional mixed chamber choir, most closely resembles that of The Tallis Scholars, though there are important differences. Magnificat have more of a genuinely choral rather than a chamber sound, which enables them to have the slowest performances of the Gradual and Offertory of these four versions and yet sustain the momentum, but, contradictorily, their equally convincing Introit is the slowest. The Gradual is possibly the most impressive thing on the disc, carefully built up and missing no detail.
Westminster Cathedral Choir take a quite different approach, and their massive sonic power is unmatched by any other recording, the resonant acoustics also of course enabling them to take many of the movements far more slowly than the other groups. The Gabrieli Consort, using only adult male voices, also achieve something like this richness of sound. These two performances also take, perhaps, a more subjective view of the work as a whole, and have things to offer which are completely absent in the other two recordings: I am thinking in particular of the great “Libera me” and the motet “Versa est in luctum”. The Westminster choir’s magisterial, controlled performance of the latter is quite breathtaking, and not only because it takes over a minute longer than the next slowest version: both Magnificat and The Tallis Scholars seem to have shot their bolt by “nihil sunt enim dies mei”.
Magnificat rarely aspire, I feel, to this ‘inward’ quality to quite such a degree. What they offer is an efficient, beautifully sung recording. The most serious defect is the foursquare performance of the chant, noticeable particularly in the verse of the Offertory and in the “Libera me”. To hear really flowing chant singing, either The Tallis Scholars or the Westminster version is to be recommended, or for astonishing full-throated vigour, the Gabrieli Consort. The old recording made in 1977 by the Montserrat Escalonia is once more available: the slow, measured chant singing there certainly makes one sit up and listen. The more liturgically informed performance of the chant of the Westminster or Gabrieli recordings may well not be enough to convince you if you prefer your polyphony sung by a mixed group, however, in which case the choice lies between The Tallis Scholars and Magnificat.'