Playing Elizabeth’s Tune, the television programme which The Tallis Scholars made for the BBC, explored the life and music of William Byrd, Catholic composer for a Protestant queen. In doing so it also illustrated the different styles which Byrd cultivated in his vocal music. This disc is a tribute to the all-round nature of his genius – to the kind of composer who could turn his hand to anything, and transform it.

The Tallis Scholars are hands down the most difficult performing ensemble in the world to review. The reason is simple - they have been around for so many years and have produced such a consistent and high quality product, both on record and in the concert hall, that there is simply little to say about them anymore except "bring it on!"

Known in his lifetime as 'El cantor de Maria', Guerrero was second only to Victoria in Spanish renaissance music. His Marian motets are celebrated as some of the most beautiful compositions of the period: we include five of the best, including Ave virgo sanctissima, one of the most loved and imitated pieces of polyphony from any country.

The Missa Corona spinea is a kind of treble concerto, packed with mind-blowing sonorities. If ever there was music to exemplify Shakespeare's 'Music of the Spheres', it is here, and especially in the two ecstatic treble gimells. The first performance, probably in front of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey, must have been an astonishing occasion.

The 1980 recording that not only made the Tallis Scholars a household name, but effectively led the way to today's great wave of exceptional mixed-voice choirs. Alison Stamp is faultless in the exceptionally testing soprano solo - top Cs and all - while, with the choir and solo quartet placed some distance apart, the perfect acoustic of Merton College Chapel is captured to perfection by Gimell.

The Portuguese school of Renaissance composers is only just beginning to be explored. It came to maturity relatively slowly, and when it finally did, in the first half of the seventeenth century, much of the rest of Europe had moved on to a new musical world. Only countries on the edge of the continent – especially England, Poland and Portugal – continued as late as 1650 to give employment to composers who found creative possibilities in unaccompanied choral music. Even so, very few of these composers remained completely untouched by the experiments of Monteverdi and the new Italian Baroque school, so that their music became a fascinating hybrid, looking forward and back, often unexpectedly introducing twists and turns to what otherwise might be taken for pure ‘Palestrina’.

Byrd's music for the Anglican Church has been performed regularly in services for some 400 years. Perennial favourites recorded here include the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis from the Great Service and the anthems O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth and Sing joyfully unto God.

Peter Phillips has here deliberately paired two sharply contrasted parody Masses … the former … is marvellously bright and open and is given a correspondingly outgoing performance, while the latter, inflected with chromaticism and melodic intervals that constantly fall back on themselves, is darker-hued and more plaintive, a mood well captured here in the intensity of the singing. The recording, made in the Church of St Peter and St Paul, Salle, Norfolk is well handled and adds powerfully to these flexible, expressive and beautiful readings.

This analogue recording was first issued in 1982 and features music written for the Russian Orthodox Church, ranging from anonymous medieval motets through to the first recording of John Tavener's Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete via Rachmaninov and Stravinsky.

The graphics for this Tallis Scholars release mention scholarly disagreement over the Missa Mater Patris, long attributed to Josquin but "recently shown to be by the little-known Noel Bauldeweyn," writes director Peter Phillips. "Or is it?" he adds. He sketches out the controversy, pointing out that the mass does not resemble any of Josquin's other compositions in the genre; he doesn't answer his question. However, you might take the album as a rejoinder to those questioning the authenticity of the mass. Its possible removal from the Josquin canon rests entirely on this musical evidence, so Phillips is entitled to adduce musical evidence of his own: the genuine Bauldeweyn mass included here sounds nothing like Josquin but is basically a work in 15th century style with a bit of imitative counterpoint thrown in.

Tomás Luis de Victoria was born in 1548 in Avila, the birthplace of St Teresa. Just as she seems to personify the religious ethos of sixteenth-century Spain (the good side of it, at least), so Victoria came to embody the best of the Spanish character in music. As a youth he learnt his art as a chorister at the Cathedral of Avila. So promising was he that he was sent to Rome at seventeen years of age, patronised by Philip II and by the Church, to study at the Jesuits’ Collegium Germanicum…

'Is this great music or merely weird?' wrote John Milsom in his review of this album in Gramophone. Gesualdo's sacred music, like his secular madrigals, is both eccentric and passionate.

This release by The Tallis Scholars, the seventh of nine in a project to record the complete masses of Josquin des Prez, explores two unique and contrasting works. Missa Gaudeamus represents Renaissance artistry at its most intense. Based on the first six notes of a chant melody, it deploys mathematics in a number of clever ways. Missa L'ami Baudichon represents Renaissance artistry at its most playful. It is based on just three notes from a secular folksong that sounds distractingly like the opening of Three Blind Mice. Known as the most adventurous composer of his time, Josquin's restless, searching intellect is on display in all his works.

Renaissance composers frequently based sacred works on the melodies of secular songs, which were typically placed in the tenor part as a cantus firmus. The mixing of such elements, as in Josquin's Missa Di dadi and the Missa Une mousse de Biscaye, which were based respectively on the chansons N'aray je jamais mieulx and Une mousse de Biscaye, was common practice in the 15th century. However, Josquin also used images of dice in the tenor part of the Missa Di dadi, which have been interpreted as symbols representing time ratios, indicating the length of notes relative to the other three voices.