This is a CD called Passion of Reason by a scratch group called Sour Cream. There are a couple of recorder players, a viol and (rarely) a lute type thing.
This cd contains several outstanding pieces by composers who were completely unknown to me. Close to the top of the list has to be the Ground on la mi re by Thomas Preston, which is unbelievably atmospheric, it's apparently his only surviving piece. But by no means in second place is a little sequence of three numbers by William Cornish. Cornish's fa la sol is quite substantial and involves some extended and imaginative imitative counterpoint. I'm beginning to see how so many of the best of these early contrapuntal fantasias are really explorations of rhythm, rhythm changes. His second of his pieces called Catholicon is, here at least, both rhythmically and harmonically interesting.
Nathaniel Giles Salvador Mundi is possibly the most astonishing study in rhythm here, a wonderful sense of climax. Presumably it's a transcription.
Chistopher Tye's masterpiece Sit Fast, which I'd only known as a work for viol consort, is given a splendid treatment on recorders, every bit the equal of Fretwork and Spirit of Gambo, much better than Savall.
But the high point is an enormous set of four pieces which have their origins in something called The Baldwin Manuscript, I don't know how old the music is, they're all tagged as Kyrie on the stream, and they are totally disorienting in that familiar early music way. This doesn't sound like mass transcriptions to me, but it does sound like music to come to terms with, as it were. Once again I'm missing the booklet.
There's a lot of other music on the recording, but not British.
