Missa pro defunctis / Prophetiae sibyllarum

Europe's foremost vocal ensemble performs two of the most important works by that enormously prolific master of 16th century polyphony, Orlande [Roland] de Lassus, otherwise known as Orlando di Lasso (born in Mons, Hainaut in 1532, died in Munich in 1594). The Hilliard Ensemble has sung Lassus's compositions since the group's inception. As John Potter says of the Prophetiae Sibyllarum : "They are among the finest expressions of a renaissance musical ideal: an attempt to recover from an imagined past a fusion of rhetoric and chromaticism, in which Lassus stretched the compositional boundaries of his own time and laid down a challenge to performers of ours."

Lassus wrote more than 2,000 works in diverse genres, including masses, motets, psalms, hymns, responsorial Passions and secular pieces in Italian, French and German. His motets include didactic pieces, ceremonial works for special occasions, settings of classical texts (some secular, the Prophetiae Sibyllarum among them), liturgical works and private devotional pieces. Lassus issued five volumes of sacred music as Patrocinium musices (1573-6). After his death, his sons assembled another, the Magnum opus musicum of 1604.