Ironically enough, it was the stellar performance of the Desprez that made the following work, de Rore's Missa Praeter rerum seriem feel like a letdown, creatively. De Rore's mass setting is an homage to the Desprez—both composers served the Este court in Ferrara—with de Rore using the elder composer’s motet as his foundation. After hearing Desprez put his melodies through the wood chipper, though, de Rore's development of the same material was overwrought and failed to communicate the structural polish that Desprez so effortlessly imbued in his music. Despite a few tender moments, particularly the "Benedictus," which made heavenly use of one tenor and two soprano voices, the de Rore felt like a charcoal study based on an oil-on-canvas masterpiece.

The greatest letdown of the evening came in the form of a new composition by the versatile composer Michael Nyman, Two Sonnets for Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, written for The Tallis Scholars in honor of the 40th-anniversary season. Nyman, who is best known for his lush, romantic scores to The Piano, Gattaca, and The End of the Affair, is equally adept at raucous, rhythmically charged music for both orchestra and his own saxophone-driven group, The Michael Nyman Band. What could have been an opportunity to showcase The Tallis Scholars' talents in an altogether new light, however, ended up being a pair of lifeless sonnets that merely reconstructed two piano preludes of Bach.

Both movements were incredibly static, with initial moments of serene calm eventually toeing the line into white noise, the highest sopranos perched above the ensemble in chronic sighing motives. Such was the spacing of the ensemble's register that the Mexican poet's Spanish text was inaudible; the combination of a lack of textual rhythm and the church's resonance failed to give the group any support whatsoever. Given the Scholars' virtuosic ability to deliver incredibly difficult and tightly wound textures with the greatest of ease, it was an absolute shame for Nyman to only look at color as the main proponent of his piece.

The final five works, two by Sheppard and three by Tallis, found the group once again on home ground. But when compared to the lengthy works that came before them, the five shorter English works felt like a series of "greatest hits" that gave no sense of continuity at best, and felt repetitive at worst. It's a shame that the final work, Tallis' Salve intemerata, was one of the finest performances of the evening—the early work of a composer still finding his own voice and showing a devil-may-care attitude in the process. This performance was thrilling for the group and the audience­—who, if like me, felt that rush of childish glee knowing that a long-winded church service had finally come to an end.