The infallible Gesualdo Six trademarks of consummate musicianship and scholarly integrity are much in evidence here. 'Queen of Hearts' addresses and reflects on queens spiritual (the Virgin Mary) and temporal (Mary Tudor and Anne Boleyn, among others) in a programme of music largely of the sixteenth century, but spiced with two short works from the twenty-first.

This sumptuous two-disc Renaissance choral release by the group Magnificat finds a nifty way of tying together repertory by diverse composers without reference to liturgy or purely musical considerations. Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) was a Dominican friar of Renaissance Florence who railed against papal corruption and was tortured and killed for his trouble; the scattered ashes of the title refer to the disposition of his corpse, which was cremated so that it could not serve as a rallying point for his admirers. During his imprisonment, Savonarola composed meditations on biblical texts, and it is these, more or less distant from psalms and other biblical sources, that are set here.

Like many of even the most prolific and celebrated composers of the sixteenth century, Jacobus Clemens non Papa (‘not the Pope’) has offered the history books little factual material with which to work. In contrast to the paucity of biographical material, however, many sources of Clemens' music survive. Indeed, he is one of the most widely published musicians of the entire century with fifteen Masses, over two hundred motets, many Dutch psalms and French chansons to his name.

Der heute leider weitgehend unbekannte flämische Komponist Jacob Clement alias Clemens non Papa (circa 1510 bis 1515 - 1555) war neben Palästrina und Orlando di Lasso einer der führenden Vertreter der Renaissance. Einerseits wurde er für seine geistlichen Werke bei seinen Auftraggebern und Kollegen sehr hoch geschätzt, andererseits eilte ihm der Ruf des Lebemannes voraus, der weltlichen Freuden und Genüssen nicht gerade abgeneigt war. Vielleicht ist es diese Lebenserfahrung und Inspiration, die ihn auch zu einem hervorragenden Komponisten von Chansons und weltlichen Liedern gemacht hat. Seine auffällig virtuose Beherrschung des Kontrapunktes steht in jedem Fall außer Frage.