Album: Stile Antico, Passion & Resurrection (Harmonia Mundi)

The run-up to Christmas seems hardly the most propitious time to release an Easter-themed anthology of choral music, but regardless, Passion & Resurrection is to be welcomed both for its skilled execution, and for clever programming incorporating the homely clarity of William Cornysh's "Woefully Arrayed", intended for domestic rather than church performance, and the more complex English and European arrangements of John Taverner, Thomas Tallis and Tomas Luis de Victoria. Highlights include Stile Antico's soaring, cathedral-like harmonic layerings on Tallis's "O Sacrum Convivium" and the joyous, cascading repetitions of Orlando Gibbons' "Hosanna to the Son of David".

Download: Woefully Arrayed; O Sacrum Convivium; Dum Transisset