Everything done by the Clement Janequin Ensemble is worth hearing many times. In particular the singing of Dominique Visse seems to me to have a flexibility and a fluidity that join with his intense musicality to produce some of the most expressive singing of early sixteenth-century music available today. So if this record is below the best the ensemble can do, it is still extremely welcome. It sounds as though the music is simply pitched too low for the singers to produce their best: the bass copes magnificently, with the lowest notes even cleaner on CD than they had been on LP; but the voices on the middle lines often fail to produce an adequate tone or control of intonation at this uncongenial pitch-level.
Nevertheless, the musicianship is of a very high quality, and the sacred music of Claudin de Sermisy is all the more welcome for being too often overshadowed in recent years by his (now) more famous secular works. In the wonderful Tenebrae you can hear the purity and direct expression of his secular miniatures transferred to a larger canvas and sung with a clear view to formal design. If the speeds are on the fast side in some of the other works, that too is often for formal reasons. The CD transfer loses nothing and of course has, for this kind of music, the enormous advantage of allowing the listener to select individual works with ease.'