Gombert: Magnificat I / Slave Regina / Credo / Tulerunt Dominum

"Jeremy Summerly's Oxford Camerata, for Naxos, underscores the personal stamp Gombert put on the familiar liturgical text. All of his signature traits are on display: the keen word settings, the heavy overlapping of both verbal and musical phrases to create kaleidoscopic harmonies that lend special (sometimes cryptic) significance to the words, the subtlety with which voices come in and out of play and - arguably most arresting of all - the ineluctable forward surge of sound without rests (except for short episodes of plainsong)."
--From "His Sins Are All Forgiven" by Tim Pfaff, Bay Area Reporter, October 12th, 2006

"Nicholas Gombert was one of the finest composers of the first half of the 16th century. Although his career suffered a bit of a hiccup when he was sent to be a galley slave following an act of gross indecency with a minor, he held prestigious posts with the Emperor Charles V and at Tournai Cathedral. Unlike his contemporaries, Gombert used plain song quotation and canons only rarely; it is the ingredients of texture, melodic phrasing, harmonic interplay and formal growth that must underpin successful performances of his work, and Jeremy Summerly knows exactly what to do with them, He applies carefully graded dynamics to Tulerunt Dominum meum to bring out the dramatic narrative, he uncovers an endless variety of colour in the ever-changing tsextures of the Credo, and his finely differentiated emphasis of the dissonances in the Epitaphium on Josquin's death shows immense experience and insight. Several of these pieces also appear on a 1996 recording by Henry's Eight where they are faster but seem curiously longer, and the Magnificat, sung by the Tallis Scholars (Gimell), has a slightly better acoustic but a blander musical surface"
--Review by Anthony Pryerl, BBC Music Magazine, May 2006

Nicolas Gombert was a musical genius whose emotional complexity allowed him to write music unlike that of any other Renaissance composer. A member of the generation between Josquin and Palestrina, he took the polyphonic style to its highest state of perfection. This recording brings together many of his best-known works, including the first of his eight Magnificats, the eight-voiced Credo, and Tulerunt Dominum, some of the most memorable music of the period.