This album is the second volume of the Morales Project, a series of twelve CDs produced by De Profundis that will encompass all of Morales’s Masses and Magnificats. It takes as its centrepiece his Requiem, or Missa pro defunctis, in five voices, the last of the sixteen masses published in his Liber Secundus of 1544 and thus surely written during his time in Rome. The great nineteenth-century music historian August Wilhelm Ambros memorably described this Mass as ‘unique in its terrible magnificence, gloomy and bleak, as if one were walking among dark tombs under heavy vaults supported by massive pillars […]. This Spaniard grasps death in all its terrible seriousness.’

The first part of this album is devoted to Morales’s music for the Office for the Dead—specifically, the invitatory Circumdederunt me and the first three lessons for Matins for the Dead: Parce mihi, Domine, Taedet animam meam and Manus tuae, Domine, fecerunt me. Unlike the Requiem, none of these three settings was ever published, but they circulated widely and for a long time within the Iberian sphere: they survive, often together, in a number of manuscripts in Spain, Portugal and Mexico, some of them copied well into the seventeenth century. It has been suggested that they may date from Morales’s first job, at the cathedral of Ávila in 1526–28, which would make them possibly the earliest works we still have from him.

De Profundis, founded by Mark Dourish in 2011, is a vocal ensemble that performs Renaissance polyphony using adult male forces like the church and chapel choirs of the period: the top line sung by male altos, and the lower parts taken by tenors, baritones, and basses.