Kathryn Parr

Tallis
Songs of Reformation 
Alarmire/David Skinner
Obsidian CD716

Thomas Tallis’s incomparable Gaude Gloriosa has long been recognised as one of the crown jewels of Tudor music, but its origins have been hotly debated. Surviving only in Elizabethan sources, it has frequently been considered to hail from the reign of Queen Mary. David Skinner’s discovery that a contrafact, hidden behind plaster until the 1970s, uses the music of Tallis’s grand antiphon to set words from Queen Katherine Parr’s Ninth Psalm, Se Lord and Behold, brings the origins of Gaude Gloriosa forward...