Completeness Ave Mujica

In this album we find Westminster Cathedral Choir at the peak of their powers, performing masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. These two magnificent and contrasting settings perfectly demonstrate why Palestrina has been acknowledged as the master of this repertoire from his lifetime to the present day.

Carrier Records presents Ave Maria: Variations on a Theme by Giacinto Scelsi, an album-length work from composer Ian Power and Bay Area-pianist Anne Rainwater. Power unwinds the original melody of Scelsi’s 1972 hymn, over and over, into an obsessive meditation for performer and listener alike. What begins as lush chords and hammering bells is interrupted by a bizarre ritual where the pianist must perform an impossible task and be held musically accountable for their mistakes. Ave Maria’s relentless repetitions and uncannily tonal harmonies probe, exalt, and challenge religious concepts of devotion and interiority.

The Missa Ave Maris Stella, with its lyrically reverential mood and long duo and trio passages, is among Josquin Desprez's most popular masses, and the listener can choose from among recordings by top Renaissance a cappella vocal groups. This one by the Netherlands ensemble Cappella Pratensis presents itself as hyperauthentic. Backed by a booklet essay from Josquin specialist Jennifer Bloxam, the group purports to re-create the practices, discourse, and atmosphere that would have attended a performance of the mass in the papal chapel around the year 1500.

P!nk isn't a stranger to naked confessionals – her 2008 album Funhouse played like a dance-pop version of Shoot Out the Lights – but she's never stripped her music down to the bone, which is what makes her You & Me side project with Dallas Green (of City and Colour, formerly of Alexisonfire) somewhat disarming. Rose Ave is tagged as a folk album and that's largely true…

The inclusion of the one surviving Mass by the Flemish composer Gery de Ghersem, most of whose music perished in the fire which accompanied the Lisbon earthquake, was an added incentive to listen to this before the other CDs and DVDs which arrived in the same batch. In the event, neither the music nor the performances disappointed and the recording and documentation provided added enjoyment.l