A sublime survey of sacred music of the high Renaissance, Hyperion's 2018 release Amarae Morti offers transparent performances by Peter Phillips and the a cappella chamber choir El León de Oro. Covering music of the Franco-Flemish and Iberian schools, the program follows a trajectory from darkness to light, from somber motets by Dominique Phinot, Orlande de Lassus, Nicolas Gombert, and Manuel Cardoso to glorious works by Tomás Luis de Victoria, Cristóbal de Morales, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. There is a consistency of subjects in the program, which includes settings of the Lamentations, Media Vita, the Regina Coeli, and the Magnificat, revealing different treatments of these familiar texts and varying levels of complexity and contrapuntal mastery, which culminate in the magnificent polychoral works of Victoria and Palestrina.

I really doubt that anyone but an expert could tell the difference between the French music in this collection and the music in Piffaro's Italian collection. Both discs are equally charming; both feature the same variety of well-played, tasty-sounding period instruments. Both have moments of reflective beauty, but most of the music makes you feel like getting up and dancing. If you don't know this period, start out with this disc or with Canzone e Danze. Both will cheer you up.

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.

This is The Brabant Ensemble’s third disc for Hyperion. Under their director, eminent musicologist Dr Stephen Rice, they continue to excavate jewels of the sixteenth-century choral repertoire which have until now remained under-performed and under-represented in music history. Their natural and instinctive performing style, which foregrounds the essential vocal qualities of this music, unlike the instrumental tone of other early music choirs, brings these beautiful and complex works abundantly to life.

It's always great to encounter the recording that can "crack" a composer open, making his or her music accessible to a general listening public. And it's all the better when such a recording comes from beyond the usual quarters, as, for example, with this American recording of Renaissance polyphony. Nicolas Gombert was a Flemish Renaissance composer, a successor (and possibly a student) of Josquin who entered the service of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His music, especially in his masses, tends to present itself as a dense, unbroken flow of polyphony. Gombert is one of the composers music history students tend to slog through in hopes of getting to the good stuff. One noted Renaissance scholar used to refer to him, Adrian Willaert, and Giaches de Wert as "the Ert brothers." All that could change with this disc of Gombert motets and chansons. These works are less dense than his masses, but not by much, and they are considerably less limpid than Josquin's pieces in the same genres. But here it is the performances that clarify them. The Massachusetts ensemble Capella Alamire (the name is a pun on an aspect of an old solmization system) under director Peter Urquhart, recording in a church in Portsmouth, NH, slows the motets down slightly and addresses them with a group of eight singers – the black belt of choral singing.

The 16 voices of the British choir Stile Antico have a reputation for perfect blend and for programs that go beyond the favorites generally essayed by the similarly sized British choir the Sixteen. That's what's in this collection of motets (and the chanson Mille regretz) united by their connection to the Hapsburg court. It may be surprising to see Thomas Tallis under that rubric, but as the informative booklet points out, he makes the cut due to the marriage of Philip II of Spain to Mary Tudor. As that suggests, and as might be expected from a collection of pieces spanning a century, the Hapsburg factor does little to unite these pieces, even if the Emperor Maximilian does get name-checked at one point. Instead, this is simply a collection of intriguing Renaissance works that are generally beyond the ones normally heard.

Auf »The Landscape of the Polyphonists« präsentieren das Huelgas Ensemble und Paul Van Nevel auf zwei fantastischen CDs den intensiven melancholischen und imitatorischen Stil der französisch-flämischen polyphonen Musik und erkunden, wie die Musik durch den besonderen Charakter der Landschaft, in der jeder Komponist sein Leben verbrachte, geprägt wurde. 24 ausgewählte Landschaftsaufnahmen und Bilder von flämischen Kathedralen und ihrer Umgebung versetzen den Zuhörer in die Welt der flämischen Länder der Renaissance, während das Huelgas Ensemble die Werke von außergewöhnlichen Komponisten wie Antoine Busnois, Nicholas Gombert, Josquin Desprez sowie von weniger bekannten, aber ebenso bemerkenswerten Komponisten wie Josquin Baston, Jean l’Héritier oder Jean Mouton aufführt. Das Publikum kann die komplexe Wechselwirkung zwischen historischen Landschaften, Architektur und Musik an ihren jeweiligen Herkunftsorten unmittelbar erleben.

Jérôme Lejeune continues his History of Music series with this boxed set devoted to the Renaissance. The next volume in the series after Flemish Polyphony (RIC 102), this set explores the music of the 16th century from Josquin Desprez to Roland de Lassus. After all of the various turnings that music took during the Middle Ages, the music of the Renaissance seems to be a first step towards a common European musical style. Josquin Desprez’s example was followed by every composer in every part of Europe and in every musical genre, including the Mass setting, the motet and all of the various new types of solo song. Instrumental music was also to develop considerably from the beginning of the 16th century onwards.