THE ETON CHOIRBOOK - PURCELL CONSORT OF VOICES; ELIZABETHAN CONSORT OF VIOLS (2 CDS)

The first substantial survey of the Eton Choirbook's treasures on record, newly remastered, compiled and reissued on CD for the first time. Copied out between 1490 and 1502, the Eton Choirbook is the most substantial extant source of English liturgical polyphony from the late 15th and very early 16th centuries. The architectural historian Nicholas Pevsner described the late-perpendicular style of buildings like the chapels of Eton and King's College, Cambridge, as a 'union of practical, matter-of-fact spirit with a sense of mystery, and an almost oriental effusion of ornament'. What we contemplate in these buildings we may hear mirrored by the music of the Eton Choirbook. From the 1920s onwards attempts were made to perform and record pieces from the Eton Choirbook but they were hampered both by the technical demands of the music - often as thrilling as it is rhythmically complex and metrically unstable - and by it's relative unfamiliarity to English cathedral choirs. Only in 1968 was