harmonia mundi (en)

A total work of art. When his Penitential Psalms were published in Munich in 1584, Orlande de Lassus was the most famous composer in Europe. The work had been composed 25 years earlier, but it did not show its age in the slightest. And, four centuries later, this collection still rouses the admiration of musicologists and the astonishment of performers and listeners, for the pure musical beauty of ‘abstract’ polyphony is here matchlessly combined with the expressive possibilities of speech.