Anima Mea

Cristian Carrara, born and educated in the Friuli region of north-east Italy, has earned critical admiration as one of the most creative composers of his generation. Clarity and directness inform much of his music, as does a sense of mystery, examples of which can be heard on this album. These recent works were composed during 2016–21 and focus on dialogues between a solo instrument and the orchestra. All are strongly narrative in character but as The Devil’s Bridge shows, they are also informed by rhythmic vivacity and a rich variety of instrumental colour.

It is the story of a rebirth. The music of Jan Dismas Zelenka, long completely forgotten, has regained it's place in concert life in recent decades thanks to new editions of sheet music and enthusiastic performers.

We bring together on two CDs the most beautiful songs from Noël baroque, an album by the Maîtrise de Radio France and Les Musiciens de Saint Julien under François Lazarevitch that has enjoyed great success in recent years, completed by Noëls en Pays d’Oc and other ancient Christmas carols. The second CD presents excerpts from great sacred classical masterpieces (such as Handel’s Messiah and Vivaldi’s Gloria by Hervé Niquet, and Bach’s B minor Mass by Raphaël Pichon) as well as instrumental pieces including Corelli’s ‘Christmas’ Concerto by Amandine Beyer and excerpts from Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos by Café Zimmermann and ‘Winter’ from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. An ideal programme of music to accompany Christmas Eve. This double album is presented in an elegant ‘popup’ that can be placed at the foot of the tree when the time comes!

All the music on this release is associated with the festival of Christmas. Bach wrote the cantata Unser Mund sei voll Lachens (BWV 110) for morning service on Christmas Day 1725, and the first version of the Magnificat in E flat major (BWV 243a) for Vespers on Christmas Day 1723, seven months after the Leipzig town council appointed him cantor of the Thomaskirche. It would hardly be exaggerating to say that Bach thus presented his visiting card to his new employer. According to the Bach scholar Christoph Wolff, the work is his "first really large-scale and complex piece of church music".

The core of Juliusz Luciuk's musical oeuvre are religious vocal and instrumental works, piano compositions, and great stage works.

The two works on this recording are separated by 35 years, during which time Penderecki made a decisive break with the post-war European avant-garde. In the Magnificat, chilling instrumental clusters, spectral sounds and impassioned rhetoric unite with tonality and counterpoint to deliver a work of monumental emotional power. Written to mark the 65th anniversary of the end of the Jewish ghetto in Łódź, Kadisz is among the most distinctive of Penderecki’s later choral works in the stark contrasts between drama and sombre reflection of its individual sections.

Venice, July 1603: Giovanni Croce, known as ‘il Chiozzotto’, a priest at the church of Santa Maria Formosa, was appointed maestro di cappella of St Mark’s basilica, one of the most prestigious posts in the musical world of the time.

Since the early 1980s, the ensemble Sequentia’s name has been closely linked with the music of Hildegard von Bingen, the visionary abbess whose musical compositions are among the most astonishing and unique creations from the dynamic milieu of 12th-century Benedictine monasticism.

On 9 April 1786, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach conducted a charity concert in Hamburg featuring three of his finest and most representative works: the Symphony Wq 183/1 (1780), the Magnificat written in 1749 in the hope of succeeding his father as Kantor in Leipzig, and finally the stupendous Heilig (1776) for double choir, of which he wrote: ‘It will be my swansong of this kind, and will serve to ensure that I shall not soon be forgotten after my death.’ He was right: 300 years after his birth, this album with the same programme proves as much.