The British vocal ensemble The Cardinall's Musick maintains a reputation for flawless accounts of English vocal music from earlier periods while also venturing into contemporary repertoire. Its extensive discography, issued first on ASV and later on Hyperion, has collected multiple major awards, among them a series of Thomas Tallis albums that appeared throughout the 2010s and included the 2018 release Tallis: The Votive Antiphons.
Andrew Carwood and musicologist David Skinner established the group in 1989, both then working as lay clerks; this dual origin in performance and scholarship distinguishes the ensemble from most early-music organizations. Carwood has remained its director into the mid-2020s. The name commemorates Cardinal Wolsey (ca. 1473-1530). Although founded with an all-male roster, the addition of women's voices accompanied the early-1990s ASV recordings of Nicholas Ludford, and the group continued to record prolifically for that label until the mid-2000s. It most often appears as an octet under Carwood, producing a full-bodied sonority that the London Telegraph once termed erotic in contrast to the purity traditionally associated with English cathedral singing.
Concerts take the ensemble throughout Britain and occasionally farther afield, encompassing regular sold-out programs at Wigmore Hall as well as appearances at the Three Choirs, Aldeburgh, and Spitalfields festivals. International engagements have included Dublin's National Concert Hall and Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. In 2013 the group opened the BBC Proms with Thomas Tallis's 40-part motet Spem in alium paired with a new work by Cheryl Frances-Hoad. While Renaissance music forms its core, 20th- and 21st-century pieces appear regularly. A landmark project remains the complete William Byrd edition, begun on ASV, transferred to Hyperion after the 2005 label change, and concluded with The Byrd Edition, Vol. 13: Infelix ego in 2010. Further Tallis projects followed in the 2010s, the most recent being Tallis: The Votive Antiphons (2018). The ensemble remains active, with the holiday program "Mirabile mysterium" set for Wigmore Hall in December 2024, at which time its catalog numbered roughly 45 recordings.
