Album: Various Artists, The Renaissance of Italian Music (EMI Classics)

Released to complement the National Gallery's Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition, this anthology offers a one-stop selection of great Renaissance choral masterworks, performed by some of the most gifted performers of the past four decades, ranging chronologically from Palestrina's "Missa Papae Marcelli" to Allegri's "Miserere".

The former is one of the highlights, the 1970 recording by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge achieving an almost weightless sublimity, particularly in the Sanctus. The Taverner Consort of the 1980s offers similarly impressive interpretations of Giovanni Gabrieli's polychoral pieces and Monteverdi's seminal "Vespro Della Beata Vergine", before the compilation returns to King's College for a 1983 recording of Allegri's "Miserere",

DOWNLOAD THIS Missa Papae Marcelli; Vespro Della Beata Vergine; Miserere