More Splendid Than the Sun highlights the joys and miracles of the Virgin Mary’s life as expressed in sacred polyphony from early sixteenth-century England. Providing the centrepiece is an extravagant, luminous six-voice Mass by Westminster-based Nicholas Ludford (c.1485-1557), most likely composed in the 1510s. The Mass is based on the plainsong Videte miraculum (‘behold the miracle of the mother of the Lord’) for the feast day of Candlemas, which commemorates the occasion when Mary presents Jesus in the temple forty days after his birth. The two soprano parts of Ludford’s Mass create a shimmering quality in many passages with their athletic, interweaving lines. 

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In large-scale Masses, early Tudor composers did not set the Kyrie; included here is a short setting by John Taverner (c.1490-1545), the first director of music at Cardinall College, Oxford (now Christ Church) in the late 1520s. The movements of the Mass are interspersed with several plainsong melodies for Candlemas, including Videte miraculum, which refers to Mary as bearing a ‘noble burden’. 

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Taverner’s magnificent five-voice Marian antiphon Gaude plurimum remained popular in England nearly sixty years after his death: the text encourages Mary, ‘the happiest woman of all who lived’, to rejoice on account of the grace her son brings to humanity, not unlike the carol The Seven Joys of Mary we know in the present day.

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Nick Walters