Peter Philips is the one first-rate Elizabethan composer who remains largely unknown today, even to specialists. His modern reputation has suffered from a form of musical chauvinism that works to the disadvantage of émigrés: he left England at an early age, never to return, so he has been ignored by English musicologists, and equally he has been treated as a foreigner by their colleagues in his adopted country, the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium). As a result, only a small amount of Philips’s music has found its way into print in this century, and less of it has been recorded. Yet it is equal in quality to the best work of that richly productive period. His keyboard music invites comparison with Byrd, his consort music with Dowland, his motets and madrigals with Gibbons and Weelkes – or rather with Lassus and Marenzio, because his vocal music in particular belongs to the cosmopolitan European tradition.