Galuppi Sacred

Sacred music written for female singers and instrumentalists of the Ospedali became celebrated during the 18th century. This unique musical tradition became widely famous largely through the works of such notable composers as Vivaldi, Hasse, Porpora and Galuppi, who were active as teachers at the four "Ospedali grandi".

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Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir - Paul Hillier
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 277 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Harmonia Mundi USA # HMU 807218 | Country/Year: US 2003
Genre: Classical, Folk | Style: Sacred

…Summary: This is a sensitive, edifying, and at times compelling performance of music from a religious tradition in which unaccompanied choral singing has an absolute and exclusive importance. The recording is clear, smooth, and balanced, and presents some truly exceptional deep bass singing. SA-CD.net

Andrea Bacchetti follows his album of sonatas by Baldassarre Galuppi with another little-performed 18th century Venetian, Benedetto Marcello, whose work has a surprisingly modern character. The "Sonata III", for instance, opens with a sequence in which the right hand plays the same note 48 times in rapid succession, while the left cycles quadruplets around it – the kind of gambit you'd expect from a Cage or Feldman, but hardly from a contemporary of Vivaldi. Marcello is said to have once fallen into a grave that opened beneath him, a trauma perhaps responsible for the austere, near-spiritual logic of pieces such as the "Sonata V", where the absence of frills prefigures the enigmatic miniatures of Erik Satie.

New light on Pergolesi! This CD sheds light on a lesser-known aspect of the great Italian composer, offering two masterpieces in their first modern edition and first recording: the Mass in D major and the mottettone Dignas Laudes. Both editions are the outcome of recent musicological research carried out by the Centro Studi Pergolesi in Milan, and show a facet of Pergolesi – his energetic and solemn character – that complements and amplifies the dramatic and introspective moods of his most renowned sacred works.

Claudio Monteverdi and Girolamo Frescobaldi were two of the most influential musical figures in 17th-century Italy; while the former's boundary-pushing madrigals, operas and sacred works changed the course of Baroque vocal music irrevocably, the latter was one of the first – and most prominent – composers to devote serious attention to composing for the keyboard.

Gérard Lesne has already given us some glorious music by largely forgotten composers such as Galuppi and Jommelli. Now he’s turned to Hasse, little-known in this year of his tercentenary but renowned in the 1700s for his operas and oratorios. A German-born composer of Italianate music, Hasse’s work exemplifies the stylistic transition from late Baroque through galant to early Viennese classicism. His 1742 sacred oratorio I pellegrini al sepolcro di Nostro Signore (The Pilgrims at the Tomb of Our Lord) is operatic in style, its succession of busy, inventive da capo arias impressively sung here by Lesne and his team, though Il Seminario Musicale’s strings can sound dry.

Vivaldi was following in the footsteps of Monteverdi when he wrote the motets, Psalm settings, choruses and other solo and ensemble liturgical pieces which are traditionally grouped together into one of the most striking and musically varied musical Offices - that of Vespers. We can assume Vivaldi intended his works in the genre for performance as acts of worship at San Marco since he was not maestro di cappella at the Pietà, the charitable refuge for girls of the city in which he worked for so long. Though we do not know for which occasion or occasions. But you should make no mistake: this recording - for all its merits - is first and foremost an otherwise un-gathered collection.
Mark Sealey

This recording of Artaserse by Leonardo Vinci (1690-1730) – born in Naples and, during his short life, celebrated as one of Italy’s leading composers of opera – represents the fourth Virgin Classics collaboration between countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic and conductor Diego Fasolis. It follows an album of Handel arias, Handel’s opera Faramondo and, in 2011, Vivaldi’s opera Farnace – “The performance fairly crackles, with accomplished singing by the flamboyant countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic in the virtuoso title role,” said the Telegraph in the UK…

(Forum Opéra, France.)