The woodcarvings of Tilman Riemenschneider (c. 1460-1531) represent the final and fullest flowering of the Gothic style in Germany. In the artistic fever of the Renaissance his work was swiftly forgotten, but after centuries of neglect his reputation is now firmly restored. On this CD, the world of Riemenschneider is given a musical perspective with a carefully chosen selection of pieces by the finest composers of his time. Inside, Hugh Griffith provides explanatory notes on his life and musical environment.

Classical Music

Exceptionally elegant performances from a first rate band of musicians.

Although it is for his instrumental music, primarily symphonies, string quartets and works for solo piano that Josef Haydn is most known, he was quite given to writing for voices and left behind a sizeable output of operas, twelve authenticated masses and numerous other settings of sacred texts for choir, soloists and orchestra. This program gives us his first and last words in the mass genre, one by an exuberant boy of seventeen the other by a tired and weary old man, although one could never discern the composer’s fatigue by listening to the music.

The Missa Brevis in F is a little gem of economy, with Haydn sailing through the wordy Credo in under three minutes, a feat he accomplished by stacking phrases of the text on top of one another and distributing them throughout the voice parts. The unusual scoring for only two solo voices, both sopranos might have been a vehicle for he and his brother Michael, though it does stretch belief a bit to think of a seventeen year old with an unchanged voice.

The Harmoniemesse is one of Haydn’s final works, written for the birthday celebrations of the Esterhazy Princess in 1802. The composer soon took his leave of the Esterhazy family after decades of service and although he lived another seven years, he did little composing after this period. There is no evidence in this joyful and exuberant mass that Haydn was at all ill. In fact, his later masses have been criticized over the years for their joyous optimism, and sometimes overly upbeat settings of the more reflective and serious parts of the texts. Be that as it may, this is a masterpiece, beautifully augmented by the full complement of wind instruments that give the mass its nickname of “harmonie.”

These are performances of divinely understated elegance. Singing from the choir is dead in tune and beautifully balanced. Phrases are splendidly shaped and tempo choices are spot on. The Trinity Choir is full of fine soloists, and there is some magnificent singing from sopranos Ann Hoyt and Julie Liston is the Missa Brevis. The Rebel Baroque Orchestra is a tight band of precision players. The clarity of their playing, especially in fast passages is without flaw. The one and only defect in this production is the lack of texts and translations in the booklet. The program notes are informative and interesting and not loaded with blow by blow descriptions of the music.

These are performances of almost text-book perfection and will be a delight to any lover of choral music. With really nothing to criticize, I can say nothing more but go add this fine recording to your library.

-- Kevin Sutton, MusicWeb International

Copied in 1540 for Canterbury Cathedral, which had just been refounded as a secular cathedral following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monastic cathedrals, the Peterhouse partbooks contain seventy-two works for five voices in the major liturgical forms of the day-principally Mass, Magnificat, and votive antiphon. Despite the enormous importance of this source to music history and the extremely high quality of much of the music contained in it, it has received short shrift from performers and musicologists alike, owing to the fact that the tenor partbook, along with a portion of the treble, has been missing for centuries. This has prevented singers from performing the fifty pieces in the partbooks that survive complete in no other source-until recently, that is. Blue Heron's performances of the incomplete Peterhouse music rely on reconstructions by the English musicologist Nick Sandon, who over the course of his career has devoted much of his creative energies to the project. Sandon completed his dissertation on the partbooks in 1983, including reconstructions of almost all of the incomplete music. Over the nearly three decades since, he has been refining and revising his completions and issuing them in Antico Edition.

Blue Heron has made the Peterhouse repertoire a specialty ever since its first concerts in 1999, in which the ensemble performed Aston's Ave Maria dive matris Anne, the opening track of the new disc. It is safe to say that Blue Heron has sung more of Nick Sandon's tenor lines than any other ensemble in North America, and never in ten years has any one in the group felt that a note he composed felt wrong. His quite amazing accomplishment is to have recreated a musical line that is utterly idiomatic, not merely to the general language of English music in the early sixteenth century, but to the local dialect and accent of one composer and, even more specifically, to that one composer's voice as heard in one piece in all its particularity. We-and Aston and Jones and Mason and all the other Peterhouse composers-owe him grateful thanks for restoring this marvelous music to us in singable form.

The CD booklet includes extensive notes by Nick Sandon on the Peterhouse partbooks, their place in history, and the process of restoring the missing music, as well detailed information concerning historical performance practice by Scott Metcalfe.

GREGORIAN CHANT FOR MEDITATION

Classical Music

The Great Organ Mass of 1768/9 was among the earliest sacred works that Haydn wrote for the EsterhAzy court and includes an obbligato organ part that he himself probably played.

This eighth and final volume of Naxos’s acclaimed survey of Haydn’s Masses contrasts the intimately scaled Little Organ Mass with the symphonically conceived Mass in B flat major, nicknamed Theresienmesse after Marie Therese (wife of Emperor Francis II and soprano soloist in the first performances of The Creation (8.557380–81) and The Seasons (8.557600–01)). The Great Organ Mass is available on 8.572125 as well as in the 8-CD boxed set of the Complete Haydn Masses (8.508009): ‘Bravo!’ (Early Music America); ‘…monumental recording…the first-ever collection of the complete Haydn Masses performed on period instruments.’ (Baker & Taylor CD Hotlist)

As Haydn scholar H.C. Landon explains, ‘it is clear that with this Missa Cellensis…he reached, and reached with panache and astonishing vigour, the popular style for which he had been so long and so diligently searching.’ For this reason, the Mariazellermesse ‘is both the precursor to Haydn’s late Masses as well as the culmination of his early efforts in the genre.’ Fourteen years elapsed before Haydn’s setting of the Mass in Time of War, also known as the Paukenmesse because of his evocative use of the timpani; the work demonstrates Haydn’s new approach to the Mass, including dramatic extremes and more frequent integration of solo and chorus.

John Rutter's Mass of the Children was recorded by the composer and his Cambridge Singers shortly after the work's premiere in 2003. That version, for soprano and baritone soloists, children's choir, adult choir, and orchestra, appeared on Collegium Records and was strongly recommended here; for the review, which includes a discussion of the Mass itself, type Q6863 in Search Reviews. The version recorded here by the Clare College Choir (Rutter's former choir) and Timothy Brown (for whom Rutter wrote the Wedding Canticle that concludes the disc) replaces the orchestra with chamber ensemble and organ with no loss of the original's exuberant spirit or essential texture and color. These choirs are every bit as competent and confident as Rutter's own forces, but with a decided edge going to Rutter's more appealing soloists, whose voices are warmer and more technically solid.


Hearing this work again, I was struck by little reminders of other composers and works, such as Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms (Gloria), Fauré's Requiem (Sanctus), and even in the baritone/soprano duet in the Kyrie, a bit of (gurk!) Andrew Lloyd Webber. But these are tiny, endearing moments in a grand and often enchanting work that contains some very clever, catchy, and masterfully written sections for adult and children's choir. Rutter's setting of Blake's poem The Lamb (appropriately part of the Agnus Dei) could stand alone as a concert piece. I also love how Rutter works the tune of Tallis' famous "Canon", sung to Thomas Ken's "Glory to thee, my God, this night", into the closing Dona nobis pacem.


I found it difficult, however, to warm up to Rutter's song cycle Shadows, for baritone and guitar. It has its moments of artful melodic writing and interesting guitar figures, but it often seems as if the two parts are at odds, not comfortable in each other's company. And Jeremy Huw Williams isn't the best advocate: his wide vibrato often obscures pitch, and his phrasing can be inelegant and doesn't always coincide with the musical line. The Wedding Canticle, for the unusual combination of choir, flute, and guitar, is a gentle, lovely piece that has all the marks of Rutter's most beloved style--flowing, inviting melody and a natural rhythmic feel that ideally captures the sense and structure of the text. [4/27/2006]
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Choral music was central to Charles Villiers Stanford's life as a composer. Balancing solemnity with rapturous affirmation. The Resurrection was his first major choral work, written while he was studying under Carl Reinecke in Leipzig and anticipating Mahler's use of Klopstock's eponymous poem in his "Resurrection" Symphony. The dramatic, at times almost operatic and Wagnerian Stabat Mater is a cantata with two purely orchestral movements suggestive of a large-scale symphony, while Song to the Soul contains some of Stanford's most exhilarating utterances, though it was never performed in his lifetime.

In his lavishly scored oratorio the Liturgy of Orpheus Yannis Markopoulos combines fragments of Orphic poems with a narrative text by Panos Theodoridis to create a work brimming with melodies, rhythms and instrumental tone colours, including those of guitar.

Franz Hauk and the Simon Mayr Chorus and Ensemble have spearheaded the revival of themusic of Johann Simon Mayr who was born in Bavaria but lived in Italy. In the latestinstalment of their critically acclaimed recordings they turn to Il sogno di Partenope, anallegorical staged cantata composed to mark the rebuilding of the Teatro San Carlo in Naplesfollowing a fire in February 1816. Mayr’s significance as an intermediary between the operaseria of the late eighteenth-century and the melodrama of the early-nineteenth is reflected inthis important work, a unique kind of ‘cantata opera’ of which only the second act survives.

The second installment in Blue Heron’s 5-CD series of Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks features Nicholas Ludford’s radiant Missa Regnum mundi, sung in a musical context like that of its probable original occasion, a festal mass for St Margaret, with plainchant items from the Proper according to the Use of Salisbury. The disc concludes with Richard Pygott’s extraordinary Salve regina, one of the longest votive antiphons extant and a marvel of rhetorical expression.

Track List:
1 Nun lasst uns Gott, dem Herren
2 Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme
3 Befiehl du deine Wege
4 Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott
5 Du meine Seele, singe
6 Gott des Himmels und der Erden
7 O Gott, du frommer Gott
8 O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß
9 Christ ist erstanden
10 Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist
11 Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten
12 Großer Gott, wir loben dich
13 Jesus, meine Zuversicht
14 Schönster Herr Jesu
15 O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden
16 Auf, auf, mein Herz, mit Freuden
17 In dir ist Freude
18 O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf
19 Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her
20 Herr Christ, der einig Gotts Sohn
21 Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern
22 Nun danket alle Gott
23 Wie lieblich ist der Maien
24 Geh aus, mein Herz, und suche Freud
25 Der Mond ist aufgegangen

German-born Simon Mayr received his musical training in Italy (he's also properly known by his Italian name Giovanni Simone Mayr), and that's where he spent his career writing both operas and sacred vocal music at the cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo. One thing's clear about this composer/teacher/choir master: he knew his Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, and if you like their sacred and theatrical music, you'll enjoy this program featuring two delightful cantatas. L'Armonia, an extended (45-minute) near-opera with three scenes, characters, choruses, virtuoso arias, and well-developed recitatives, was presented on the occasion of a state visit to Bergamo in 1825 by the Emperor Franz I and his entourage. It contains all the conventions of the day to satisfy and impress an imperial audience--the references to classical poets and mythology, symbolic associations to the emperor's benevolence and wisdom (not to mention a surprise tribute to the Empress), grand choruses and florid arias glorifying the defense of the nation's and its people's ideals in battle, and textual quotations espousing the goals of harmony and peace.

But rather than being tedious and predictable, Mayr treats us to some very appealing, expertly crafted music that handily combines some dramatic and very demanding Mozartian opera-style arias--beautifully sung by all three soloists--with choruses right out of the church works of Mozart and Haydn. The pacing is swift and conductor Franz Hauk keeps his forces tightly together most of the time--some ragged instrumental ensemble and choral intonation slips are only occasionally noticeable. Mayr also cleverly uses a harp at opportune moments to add color and for symbolic reference to the Bards, which are among the cantata's "characters".

And speaking of references, if you know Beethoven, you'll have fun picking out Mayr's nifty insertions of excerpts from some of the master's works in the Cantata for the Death of Beethoven. This 15-minute piece was basically cobbled together from original material and from existing works, and again, it's a very satisfying listen marked by strong vocal writing for the soloists and stylish orchestration. Once more I do have to mention the solo singers--soprano Talia Or, tenor Altin Piriù, and bass Nikolay Borchev--all first class and very solid in some very challenging music. They have a lot to do here, and they really carry the show. A pleasant surprise!

--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Sisto Reina is one of the many musicians from the Order of the Friars Minor Conventual who have greatly enriched the history of music. The diffusion of his music greatly exceeded the boundaries of the regions in which he was active: works of his are present in the archives of several Italian cities, and in Austria, Germany, Poland, Switzerland and England. The Armonia ecclesiastica, by Sisto Reina, published by Carlo Camagno in Milan in 1653 and dedicated to princess Angelica Luigia Mariana Gonzaga, nun in the convent of S. Paolo in Milan, is exemplary as regards the variety of forms, styles and languages that were typical of Italian seventeenth-century music, particularly in Lombardy. Michelangelo Gabrielli, Renaissance and Baroque repertoire specialist, directs the Concentus Vocum ensemble (from the Como Conservatory of Music) bringing this work to light in a world premiere recording.

Classical Music

Renowned for his outstanding piano miniatures and solo songs, John Ireland is little known these days as a composer of partsongs. His deep understanding of choral forces brings a unique polish and artistry to the genre, his early style reflecting a deference to his masters Parry and Stanford, and deeply moving post-war masterpieces such as Twilight Night exploiting a more acerbic harmonic vocabulary. E.J. Moeran's inclination towards introspective melancholy blends with his knowledge of Elizabethan madrigal and renaissance dance, resulting in true gems on themes of love such as While She Lies Sleeping.

Classical Music

“We group ourselves into nations,” David Lang writes in the program note, “but it has never really been clear to me what that means, or what we get out of it.” In 2014, he wrote The National Anthems, the featured work on Cantaloupe’s new release. The piece uses one line from each national anthem of the United Nations’ 193 countries.

Attempting to find a universal truth in the process of researching the anthems, he instead came to realize they resembled prayers for fleeting freedom rather than confidence in it. By the work's end, what remains sounds like it could be heard inside a church.

Also on the album is his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Little Match Girl Passion. After hearing from nations of people, the piece places similar prayers in the context of one person.

All together, the album has the feeling of clutching hands. Whether you believe in patriotism or not, it reminds us that everyone in the world holds onto something — whether it’s words, a melody or that which we hope is true.

– WQXR-FM (Elena Saavedra Buckley)

Bruno Maderna's Requiem was long considered lost and was indeed only premiered in the Teatro la Fenice in Venice in November 2009 - about 36 years after his death. In 1943, Maderna was called up for military service and fought as a partisan against Italy's erstwhile allies, the Germans. He was taken prisoner by the SS, who interrogated him in Dachau and released him shortly afterwards. 'At that moment, it was the only possibility to write a requiem and then to die', Maderna said later. The Requiem suggests an intensive study of the models in the genre, e.g. those by Giuseppe Verdi and Hector Berlioz. At the same time, as a 'War Requiem' the work is a pacifist manifesto.

Classical Music

This collection of classical favorites of Penderecki's work serves as a compilation of his famous works made available by Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and the Warsaw Philharmonic Choir. Also featured are renowned classical conductor Antoni Wit and other classic artist.

Bonaventura Rubino's Missa de Morti (Requiem Mass) is presented here within the liturgical and musical context that is peculiar to this friar from Bergamo. The polyphonic sections for voices and basso continuo alternate with the liturgical monodies of the ancient Roman rite, in keeping with the melodic and textual codification of St. Pius V's Missal and the Medicean Gradual. The recording of this Mass was carried out in several points of the church, in order to give the listener the physical sensation of the various spots where the ceremony was taking place and the music was being performed.