The Sistine Chapel Choir were quite late to the recording scene, but they are making up for lost time under director Massimo Palombella. The strengths of the choir's performances on this holiday release are threefold. First of all is the sound environment of the chapel itself, resonant and big, yet hospitable to dense polyphony since Josquin was a choirboy there. Josquin appears on the program here, but the motet Missus est Gabriel is not a common work, and that points to the choir's second strength: they work from a manuscript tradition, that of the Vatican, that is different from the set of scholarly publications that have long shaped the Renaissance performing repertory, and several pieces here are world premieres, or otherwise seldom heard.

In a Christmas album that is a gift itself, Jonas Kaufmann the most acclaimed operatic tenor of the age echoes his own holiday memories and joys with It s Christmas!, celebrating the most festive time of the year with a unique selection of beloved songs and carols. This uniquely rich and diverse holiday album features 40 favorites that reflect the many facets of Christmas, from ancient Christian hymns to contemporary pop classics.

Vox Iberica – Sequentia’s long-term project to record music from three of Spain’s most important musical sources – begins with music from the so-called Codex Calixtinus, a 12th century manuscript containing liturgical chant and polyphony in honour of Saint James the Apostle, otherwise known as Santiago, whose relics have been venerated by pilgrims since the Middle Ages in the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. For this recording, the eight men’s voices of Sequentia join to record the complete polyphony found in this magnificent collection of sacred music, including some of the earliest polyphony to be clearly notated in a European source.

Famous as its title has become through Carl Orff's work of the same name, the original Carmina burana—a German manuscript collection of mostly secular songs, probably compiled in the early thirteenth century—is all but unknown to modern listeners. That it should be so is hardly surprising, since many of the pieces in the manuscript pose formidable editorial problems (inasmuch as they can be deciphered at all), and since virtually nothing is known about the manner in which they would have been performed and accompanied, nor about the circumstances under which they would have been heard.

The Carmina Burana is the most famous of all treasuries of medieval Latin and Middle High German poetry, named after the Bavarian monastery where it was compiled and preserved. It is best known today for Carl Orff's hour-long selection from it's rich collection of love lyrics, student songs and religious poetry written in Latin and old German. During the 1960s and 70s a few early-music ensembles made more or less successful efforts to capture the unique mix of secular and sacred idioms brought together by the original manuscripts.

A la suite des précédents albums consacrés aux Grands offertoires grégoriens I et II, Damien Poisblaud et Les Chantres du Thoronet nous emmenent cette fois dans le temps liturgique du Carême, préfiguration de la Passion du Christ. Ces grands offertoires grégoriens du Carême nous emportent au-delà des mots. Les mélodies nous prennent par la main et nous conduisent, comme à notre insu, en des contrées où l’humain devient poreux au divin. Ces chants nous mettent le Ciel à l’âme comme la vue d’un fruit nous met l’eau à la bouche.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce Hush!, the second release by the extraordinary voices (BBC Radio 3) of female quintet Papagena following their internationally acclaimed, Amazon classical chart-topping debut, The Darkest Midnight (SOMMCD 0189). Hush! unearths a treasure trove of songs largely neglected on disc to deliver a stunning follow-up to The Darkest Midnight. Where it hymned the cold, harsh glamour of sun-starved winter, Hush! playful, poignant, poetic and primed with the expectation of joy celebrates the warmth and light of love.

L'Office de la supplication en l'honneur de la Sainte Mère de Dieu, dit office de la Paraclisis, est l'un des plus beaux que compte la liturgie byzantine, au même titre que l'hymne acathiste. Chanté en arabe et en grec, il est ici interprété dans la plus pure tradition orientale d'Alep en Syrie.

The Cistercian order was born at the end of the 11th century around the new monastery of Cîteaux and developed by Bernard of Clairvaux in the following years. Their aim was to return to the basics of the austere Benedictine rule, as opposed to the less stricter developments that had taken place around Cluny. These ideas quickly spread around Europe, producing great architecture and great liturgical music, devoid of embellishments and flourishments then considered unnecessary. Sabine Lutzenberger and her Ensemble PER-SONAT presents the sounds of Cistercian monasteries all around Europe.

What these sound recordings attempt to do is to bring you face-to-face — or, perhaps more appropriately, sound to-heart — with actual works of the troubadours and, occasionally, of others in their circle of influence. The task is daunting for so many reasons: songs got written down decades, even centuries, after their dates of creation; only about ten percent of the original melodies survive; and most direct knowledge of how performers worked out their interpretations at the time has been lost. We know nothing whatsoever about the singing style, or about the techniques of instrumental accompaniment that may have been employed. These performances, therefore, of necessity, reflect a confluence of musicological and philological knowledge with performers' instincts and intuitions, as all of these tendencies interacted with each other at a specific moment in history, the late twentieth century.

This cycle of "O" Antiphons is part of the Christmas Vespers ceremony, centered around the Magnificat. In the present case, they are heavily troped, and end with a liturgical motet in a more triumphant mood.
The music itself it thoroughly isorhythmic, and heavily syncopated. The pieces form a true cycle, linked by both a sequence of modality and motivic figures. This is the most elaborate sacred section of the huge Turin manuscript (Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS J. II 9), the one source for the Cypriot repertory.

With this new recording, La Reverdie explores the well-known collection of medieval songbooks known as Carmina Burana. The manuscript features a series of texts, mostly in Latin, compiled between the 12th and early 13th century at the request of an anonymous abbot of Kloster Neustift in the southern Tyrol. Already the object of many recordings, these refined songs are presented here in an absolutely new approach. This recording focuses on the amorous and, above all, moralizing poems, partly because of the topicality of their messages. Performed in universities and ecclesiastical circles throughout all of Europe, they are a sort of highly refined ‘clerical entertainment’, lacking neither irony nor tender nostalgia.