BBC Singers - Profile of Dominique Pinot

Lucie Skeaping presents a programme about the rather shadowy life and the music of 16th century French composer Dominique Phinot, with recordings made by the BBC Singers, conducted by David Hill.

We actually know very little about Phinot - not even when he was born, although the general consensus is that it was around 1510. There's evidence that Phinot spent some time in northern Italy during the mid 1540s, at both the court and the cathedral in Urbino, just south of Venice where some of his music was published. He made several settings of French poetry - witty, and occasionally salacious chansons, but most of Phinot's surviving works are for the church. There are a couple of masses, a handful of magnificats, and almost 100 motets, which served to be the inspiration for future generations of composers like Palestrina and Lassus.

Sources suggest that Phinot was executed in Lyon in around 1556, for homosexual practices - which means his punishment may have been to be beheaded and burned. If that really was the horrible fate that befell Dominique Phinot, it may explain why he's been 'out-of-mind' for so long.