L'uomo in Cristo

Portuguese composer Pedro de Cristo is nowhere near as familiar as Duarte Lobo or Manuel Cardoso, who may show up on general concerts of Renaissance choral music. Cristo's music was never published and was largely lost to history until some painstaking research work, described in the booklet of this Hyperion release. That is likely to change after this 2022 release by the eight-voice choir Cupertinos, which made classical best-seller charts late that year. The music is lovely, with the limpid, reverential treatment of text found in the works of Cristo's greatest Spanish contemporaries. There are long homophonic stretches in the motets that have a starkly emotional effect. The Missa Salve regina, whose motet exemplar is included, is more thoroughly polyphonic, but Cristo's orientation toward directness and clarity remains. Sample the gorgeous Crucifixus section.

When Alice in Chains' debut album, Facelift, was released in 1990, about a year before Nirvana's Nevermind, the thriving Seattle scene barely registered on the national musical radar outside of underground circles (although Soundgarden's major-label debut, Louder Than Love, was also released that year and brought them a Grammy nomination). That started to change when MTV jumped all over the video for "Man in the Box," giving the group a crucial boost and helping to pave the way for grunge's popular explosion toward the end of 1991. Although their dominant influences - Black Sabbath, the Stooges - were hardly unique on the Seattle scene, Alice in Chains were arguably the most metallic of grunge bands, which gave them a definite appeal outside the underground; all the same, the group's sinister, brooding, suffocating sound resembled little else gaining wide exposure on the 1990 hard rock scene…