For nearly 74 years from the death of J.S. Bach in 1750 to Mendelssohn’s fifteenth birthday in 1824 the Matthäus Passion had all but disappeared. Young Mendelssohn’s prized birthday gift - a bespoke a copy of the Passion - was to change music history when five years later he mounted its first performance in the nineteenth century in Berlin. Today it is inconceivable to imagine music without Bach, but in the 1820s his music had been relegated to no more than the exercise-book for students of counterpoint.

With this 2011 release, Musica Vaticana, Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal, led by its founder Christopher Jackson, solidifies its reputation as one of the very finest choirs specializing in music of the Baroque and Renaissance. Its tone is warmly blended and pure, and it is able to produce a wide range of tonal colors suited to whatever is being performed. Most importantly, the chorus enters fully into the spirit of the music, so its performances are lively and spontaneous-sounding.

This collection of English verse anthems and viol fantasias – there are no examples of the a cappella, highly polyphonic full anthem – comes from Montreal's vibrant early music scene and it offers a fresh version of these often-recorded classics of English choral music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The verse anthem, written in English, was a characteristic Anglican genre, alternating between choral and solo passages and deploying the text across plain but often rather fervent lines of music. It is accompanied here, as was normal, by viols; an organ can also be used. Done right, a work like John Ward's Prayer is an endless chain (track 2) or any of the three thorny but exultant anthems by Orlando Gibbons should have the combination of piety and rich beauty that would be characteristic of Bach's music a century or more later.