André Rieu and his album “Forever Vienna” has been toppled from the top of the Specialist Classical Chart by a 16th-century composer, Alessandro Striggio. The Missa Ecco sì beato giorno is in 40 parts and has been recorded for Decca for the first time by I Faglioni directed by Robert Hollingworth. First heard in modern times at the 2007 Proms in a performing edition by Davitt Moroney, Hollingworth prepared a new edition with Brian Clarke. The Mass is coupled with Striggio’s motet Ecce beatam lucem and Tallis’s Spem in alium. 

At a launch last week, Hollingworth talked about the relationship between the Striggio Mass and Tallis’s great choral work. 'Striggio took the Mass from Florence to Vienna in 1567 and then carried on a sort of European tour of it. He was due to go home but wrote to his boss, Cosima de' Medici and said that he’d really like to go to London to meet the great virtuosi of the music profession there – that’s Byrd and Tallis. Now we don’t know whether he met them – he met Queen Elizabeth – but there’s an extraordinary bit of information that comes from a lawyer’s book in 1611 that says that about 40 years ago a music from Italy came to London in 30-parts (he clearly got this wrong) and it being sung made “a heavenly harmony”. So it was obviously performed in some form. And the Duke of Norfolk, “hearing this song said 'Is there not an Englishman who can do the like?' And Mr Tallis thought it fit to write a 40-part piece".'

Unusually, Hollingworth has opted for an instrumental accompaniment to the choral works and gathered round him an extraordinary collection of the UK’s leading early music specialists at the recording sessions in All Saints, Tooting in South London. The recording has been made in 5.1 surround-sound as well as stereo.

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