In his recent—and more or less definitive—reconstruction of the Great Service for the Byrd Edition, Professor Craig Monson puts a case for believing that it was composed in the 1580s and ''thus represents the crowning achievement of two decades of creativity in the Chapel Royal''. So it should perhaps surprise nobody that two recordings of it should be issued simultaneously. The main surprise is that it has been so rarely recorded.
Both recordings are very good and can be recommended without hesitation. Both show fine musicianship, both sound natural, both give due prominence to the words that are so important in this music, and both are well caught by the engineers. But they are entirely different from one another, showing different features of the music. Many people will surely want to own both.
The Tallis Scholars inevitably have the more mature voices, with somewhat greater control of the musical details; but then the King's College Choir have the advantage of using boys on the top lines. While the case for or against boys is not at all clear for Byrd's Latin church music, there can be no question that boys are historically and musically correct for the Great Service (which is by no means to denigrate the beautifully controlled and focused singing of the ladies in The Tallis Scholars). King's also gain in having a full choral sound to provide an exciting contrast with the solo verses, whereas The Tallis Scholars do not deploy enough extra singers to make the difference worthwhile. There can be arguments about the meaning here of the 'verse' and 'full' indications, as indeed about their textual authority; but these contrasts do add a further dimension to the King's performance.
The Tallis Scholars sing unaccompanied, whereas King's perform with organ throughout. Here too there is no very simple historical answer, since the surviving organ sources are all late and add nothing essential that is not in the vocal lines, though there is a fair case for believing that such music normally had organ participation by the 1580s. Still, the results are perhaps predictable. With The Tallis Scholars you can hear rather more of the musical details and rather more vocal inflection, though the King's record remains astonishingly clear thanks partly to Richard Farnes's beautifully tactful playing on an organ built by Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn.
So from Stephen Cleobury and King's you get the performance that seems nearer to the spiritual and historical sound-world of the piece whereas Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars provide something more helpful for an objective understanding of the work's greatness.
But the King's record does have two small advantages. It includes the Kyrie which Peter Phillips omits ''on musical grounds''. And it builds the two Evensong canticles into a semi-liturgical context with anthems, responses and so on—a solution that to my ear works very well in staging the musically relevant outlines without going doggedly through the whole service. Peter Phillips simply adds three anthems at the end to fill out the LP (though their appropriateness may be judged from their including two that also appear in the King's record).
One final comment. Neither record uses Professor Monson's edition, which was published as recently as 1982. King's had one newly prepared by James Wrightson; the one used by The Tallis Scholars is by Peter Phillips. The reason for making all these new editions are scarcely musical or practical, since the versions here differ from Monson only in details of little substance. No: I fear the reasons are that the performance rights payable for any published edition are unrealistically high. It is almost always cheaper for a record company to commission a new edition. That new edition is relatively easy to do, particularly if there is a good recent published one such as that by Monson, where a bewildering range of sources is painstakingly sorted and evaluated. There is no simple solution to this problem, short of reconsidering the entire legal position on performance rights. But the duplication of effort here is heart-breaking.'