Blue Heron Choir/Metcalfe - Aston:Three Marian Antiphons

Blue Heron's second CD launched a 5-CD project with superb music by three English composers of the early 16th century: Hugh Aston (c.1485-1558), Robert Jones (fl. c.1520-1535), and John Mason (c.1480-1548). They are virtually unknown to performers and scholars today, for the primary extant source of the music is now incomplete through the loss of one partbook and a portion of another, out of an original set of five. The set, known as the Peterhouse partbooks, was copied in 1540 for Canterbury Cathedral and is the largest and most important source of English music surviving from the period just before the Reformation. Blue Heron expects to complete the project with the release of volume 5 in 2015.