The recordings are typical DHM with superb clarity and dynamic range. The mastering to digital is excellent, and the booklet accompanying the series, while brief, is informative. The only unifying these here is baroque Italian composers, but it's extremely easy to fill a collection ten times this size with material from that category. What we end up with in these ten discs is a lovely mix of known and unknown, each pleasant to listen to and discover, and there's no listener fatigue at all working through these discs.

The six-voice a cappella vocal ensemble, Nordic Voices, was formed a little over ten years ago to specialize in both Renaissance and Contemporary music. In this, their fifth album, they present a moving programme of renaissance Lamentations. These are settings of Old Testament verses written by the prophet Jeremiah as he witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem and the fall of Judah in 586 B.C. and, as Nordic Voices highlight in their booklet, are still of relevance today as they chart the horrors that humans are capable of inflicting on one another.

The choral and instrumental parts for Gabriel Fauré's 1893 version of the Requiem, Op. 48, were discovered in 1969, and a score was assembled from them and published in 1994. Since then, this edition has been finding admirers, such as Laurence Equilbey and her hand-picked choir Accentus, who perform the Requiem with members of the Orchestre National de France on this 2008 Naïve release. The impact of the work is still quite strong and imposing in this chamber version, even when compared with performances of the full orchestral score of 1901, and it helps that the recording is full, deep, and vibrant, so textures are substantial and tone colors are rich, without giving the slightest impression that any forces are lacking.

…Süssmayr, of course, was not the only, or even the first, person engaged by Constanza Mozart to work on her late husband’s unfinished masterpiece. Her first choice was Josef Eybler, another of Mozart’s students, and the one that Mozart had considered more capable. Eybler worked on the orchestration of the portions of the score for which Mozart had written vocal parts and a continuo bass line, but balked at providing original music for the missing sections of the Requiem. Süssmayr then took over, enjoying the advantage of having discussed Mozart’s intentions for the completion of the score with him. It’s entirely possible that the young assistant had a second advantage, namely that he was not sufficiently aware of the implications of the monumental task that Eybler had abandoned and that he was undertaking. There’s an unresolved dispute over his decision to bring the score to a close by repeating the music of the first fugue.

Marking the 150th anniversary of Berlioz’s death, this performance of the mighty Requiem or Grande Messe des Morts - took place in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in March 2019. Conducted by John Nelson, it involved over 300 musicians, including tenor Michael Spyres. As Nelson said: “Every measure resonates deeply with me and I feel there is sincerity, even in the great moments of bombast.” The Times wrote: “The surpassing virtue of this performance … was that both aspects, the spine-shakingly spectacular and the heart-rendingly haunting, were allowed to make their impact.

The Bernardino de Ribera whose works are recorded here, all but one for the first time, is all but unknown; he is not to be confused with the Spanish-Mexican composer Bernardino de Ribera Sahagún. He was active in the city of Toledo, Spain, a generation before Tomás Luis de Victoria, whom he taught and influenced. His obscurity is due to vandalism rather than to any issue of musical quality: the splendid manuscript that forms the main source for his music was cut up by someone who wanted the illuminations, and on the reverse of those were many sections of Ribera's works.

Even though Portuguese composer Manuel Cardoso lived well into the early Baroque era, his music was informed by the older Renaissance polyphony of Palestrina, and despite the dramatic stylistic changes that developed elsewhere in Europe, his works remained rather conservative and representative of the church music of the Counter-Reformation. Like his older Spanish contemporary Tomás Luis de Victoria, Cardoso's best-known work is his Requiem (Missa pro defunctis a 4), which is perhaps the most frequently performed of his surviving compositions, which were published in five volumes in Lisbon between 1613 and 1648.

Biber's grand Requiem in A Major was probably written for the funeral of his employer, Archbishop Maximilian of Salzburg. It is a celebratory piece, with trumpets (and timpani added by Savall) and rich orchestration, quite suitable for a heavenbound soul. The quieter moments ("Sanctus") are just as effective as the big ones ("Dies irae"). The CD's opener, a 13-minute "Battalia" for instruments only, is amazingly colorful and contains some weird, entertaining dissonances. The performances by La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations are ideal. Biber seems to be coming into his own lately, and the recent CDs devoted to his work are very exciting. He was apparently a virtuoso who enjoyed making big statements; they deserve to be heard. Lovers of "high Baroque" music will be moved and delighted.

–Robert Levine

Mate saule is Mother Sun – and Peteris Vasks worships her. Any meeting or interview with the Latvian composer is likely to end up with a tramp through the forests or a swim in the Baltic. And much of Vasks’s music is a meditation on the eternal attributes of Nature, in a continuum of life which stretches beyond the fever and the fret of his own fast-changing world. Mate saule is an early choral work, its voices oscillating like the shimmer of a sun slowly rising from the horizon, and lit by flares and fragments of chant. Vasks’s choral music has tended to be instrumental in texture, focusing on the overall mood rather than the specific verbal activity of any text he is setting. The ‘white diatonicism’ of Mate saule gives way to more disturbed, aleatoric harmonies and more disruptive textures as political change and human turmoil take centre stage in the late Eighties in Zemgale, a song about the anguished dilemmas of exile. This is a subject at the very core of the work of the Polish-Lithuanian writer Czeslaw Milosz (now resident in the USA); and the three poems set by Vasks in 1994 receive their world premiere recording. They were originally written for the Hilliard Ensemble: here the excellent Latvian Radio Choir works with concentrated focus on the spare harmonies and elusive metres which recreate the wonder of three transient moments out of time.

Louis XVI was the last king of France (1774-92) in the line of Bourbon monarchs preceding the French Revolution of 1789. Louis and his queen consort, Marie-Antoinette, were guillotined in 1793 on charges of counter-revolution.
Following the abdication of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814, the Bourbons returned to power in France and restored the system of monarchy under Louis XVIII. During this process, they also introduced a number of highly symbolic cultural acts as a public representation of the Bourbon dynasty. In 1815, the new king Louis XVIII had the mortal remains of Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette removed from the Cimetière de la Madeleine in a solemn ceremony, taken to Saint Denis and placed in separate graves in the crypt.

Hildegard von Bingen - Celestial Stairs - Ensemble für frühe Musik Augsburg (1997) {Christophorus CHR77205}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 227 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 131 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 155 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1997 Christophorus | CHR 7720
Classical / Medieval

I have a lot of Hildegard in my collection this cd would have to be the most satisfying offering on the market. It combines a mixture of female and male voices and instrumentals, all executed with artistic ingenuity and subtlety. Forget Sequentia, Synfonie, Oxford Camerata….the Ensemble fur fruhe musick augsburg knows how to interpret Hildegard the best. Their earlier foray "Hildegard und Ihre Zeit" was only a taste of what was to come. You can't go wrong in buying this cd.' Highly recommended.

Fux was born to a peasant family in Hirtenfeld in Styria. Relatively little is known about his early life, but likely he went to nearby Graz for music lessons. In 1680 he was accepted at the Jesuit university there, where his musical talent became apparent. From 1685 until 1688 he served as organist at St. Moritz in Ingolstadt. Sometime during this period he must have made a trip to Italy, as evidenced by the strong influence of Corelli and Bolognese composers on his work of the time.

Although his name might not rate very highly on the recognition meter even of classical music buffs, Franz Tunder was a consequential entity in the early history of the German Baroque. Tunder served as organist at the Marienkirche in Lübeck from 1641 to his death in 1667, and during that time instituted the Abendmusiken, the first series of public concerts to take place in Germany. Seventeen vocal "concertos" exist from Tunder's pen and they were created for these special events; little more than half of them appear on this generous and well-performed CPO disc, Franz Tunder: Concerti. Conductor Hermann Max leads Das Kleine Konzert and the singing group Rheinische Kantorei in 10 concerti, which uses a variety of singers in frontline combinations. Tunder must have had some good basses in his chorus, as they have most of the hardest music in the Concerti, and five of these ten works are sung by bass or basses alone. Both men used here, Ekkehard Abele and Yoshitaka Ogasawara, do an excellent job. The string parts are crisp and do not dawdle, and Max never allows the music to get too grandiose, wisely keeping it within the boundaries of the chamber idiom to which it belongs. The music is never ornately busy and has a relaxed, soothing effect.