Nicholas Gombert was one of the finest composers of the first half of the 16th century. Although his career suffered a bit of a hiccup when he was sent to be a galley slave following an act of gross indecency with a minor, he held prestigious posts with the Emperor Charles V and at Tournai Cathedral. Unlike his contemporaries, Gombert used plain song quotation and canons only rarely; it is the ingredients of texture, melodic phrasing, harmonic interplay and formal growth that must underpin successful performances of his work, and Jeremy Summerly knows exactly what to do with them, He applies carefully graded dynamics to Tulerunt Dominum meum to bring out the dramatic narrative, he uncovers an endless variety of colour in the ever-changing tsextures of the Credo, and his finely differentiated emphasis of the dissonances in the Epitaphium on Josquin's death shows immense experience and insight. Several of these pieces also appear on a 1996 recording by Henry's Eight where they are faster but seem curiously longer, and the Magnificat, sung by the Tallis Scholars (Gimell), has a slightly better acoustic but a blander musical surface