Under the direction of Philip Cave, Magnificat embarks on a three-volume journey exploring the ingenuity of Orlandus Lassus. In this rich collection of Magnificats based on polyphonic models, Lassus - 'The Alchemist' - demonstrates an unsurpassed ability to reimagine existing material in the creation of his own works. This first volume of the series presents Lassus's Magnificats based on madrigals, featuring models by Philippe Verdelot, Cipriano de Rore, and Alessandro Striggio among others. The second album will comprise Lassus's canticles based on motets, and the third will conclude with those inspired by chansons. In celebrating Lassus as 'The Alchemist', Magnificat reveals the creative process and skill he employed in re-working the original music and illuminates a significant repertory that is underrepresented in contemporary liturgical or concert settings.

Philippe Rogier was a Fleming who was brought to Spain in 1572, when he was about 11, to sing in the chapel choir of King Philip II. He died young, at age 35, and many of his works were lost in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. For these reasons his work remained obscure in the general 20th century rediscovery of Renaissance music, but more than 200 of his works survived, some of them in manuscripts from as far away as Mexico. The British group Magnificat and conductor Philip Cave undertake an admirable effort to explore the music of this composer, whose style included elements of both Venetian polychoral music and classic Franco-Flemish polyphony.

This sumptuous two-disc Renaissance choral release by the group Magnificat finds a nifty way of tying together repertory by diverse composers without reference to liturgy or purely musical considerations. Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) was a Dominican friar of Renaissance Florence who railed against papal corruption and was tortured and killed for his trouble; the scattered ashes of the title refer to the disposition of his corpse, which was cremated so that it could not serve as a rallying point for his admirers. During his imprisonment, Savonarola composed meditations on biblical texts, and it is these, more or less distant from psalms and other biblical sources, that are set here.