Some of the world s entertainment legends have joined forces with Engelbert Humperdinck to create tracks for his forthcoming duets album. Coming over 45 years after his first massive number one single, the incomparable trademark Please Release Me , this album is a celebration of an incredible career. The album will be released on March 17th 2014 through Conehead via Nova Distribution / Universal. Featuring brand new recordings that see Engelbert teaming up with some of music s greatest stars, this is a collection that really shines.
The delicious voice of soprano María Luz Álvarez may in itself be enough reason to purchase this album for those who have encountered it before. It's a stunning instrument in small-group Baroque chamber music, with impressive control over both pitch and dynamics, all combined with a good deal of Spanish smoke. If that were not enough, Álvarez here takes up a repertoire that remains almost unknown outside of Iberia: the so-called tonada humana, which was the first generation of Spanish Baroque song to show Italian influence, departing from the strophic and semi-popular songs associated with the venerable zarzuela genre. The music here, by Sebastián Durón and a variety of still more obscure composers, is a gorgeous fusion of Spanish and Italian (although all of it is in the Spanish language).
This internationally renowned early music group specializes in the powerfully gripping music of the Sephardic romances passed on by an oral tradition, as well as the court and sacred music of the early sixteenth century (Juan del Encina, Juan de Anchieta, Antonio de Cabezón, etc.) and the more complex polyphony belonging to the later part of that same period. The Accentus Ensemble itself was founded in Vienna in 1988.