Along with his pupil William Byrd, Thomas Tallis was the finest composer of the English Renaissance. This recording, released to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Tallis’s birth, features his largest compositions for the church. The motet Salve intemerata, written when Tallis was a young man, is one of the longest single movements of the entire 16th century. Scored for forty independent voices, Spem in alium, a work of Tallis’s maturity, dwarfs any other English work of the period. Symphonic in its proportions and conception, it is Tallis’s greatest masterpiece.