Marcello: Psalm

From an early age Benedetto Marcello proved to be a man of great versatility: a poet, writer, musician, lawyer, judge, administrator and philologist, holding important posts in these functions during his entire life. As a composer he wrote a substantial oeuvre, covering all important fields of composition: sacred and secular choral works, opera and a large body of instrumental music.

King David, soldier and poet, was for centuries a figure as attractive to musicians as to artists like the one who sculpted the big unclothed guy in Florence's Uffizi galleries. Benedetto Marcello's settings of the Psalms of David, part of a large collection called the Estro poetico-armonico, were famous during his own lifetime (1686-1739) and beyond, but have been strangely neglected in recent years even as more obscure Baroque repertories have flourished. When they are heard, it is usually because of their exotic Jewish component.

Bruno Maderna always attached great importance to insight and imagination, even during the period in which he followed the most rigorous serial procedures. Maderna’s preference for concreteness in sound images, his practical approach to composition problems, and his receptiveness to language diversity explain the extraordinary ascendancy he had over the Italian composers who visited Darmstadt in the Fifties and Sixties, including Nono, Berio, Donatoni, and Clementi.

Alessandro Scarlatti is justly famed for his contributions to Read more opera seria and cantata, and indeed it may even be said that he was one of the main progenitors of the Neapolitan style of the early 18th century. In Naples and earlier in Rome he was obligated to write a considerable amount of sacred music, much of it for smaller settings that would be useful in the local churches. Since his music is now becoming more common on disc, it is good to have this recording of a set of four pieces—a gradual, a Marian antiphon, a motet, and a Psalm—all of which reflect rather different approaches to each portion of the liturgy and yet contain a certain commonality in form and structure.

Eugene Ormandy & The Philadelphia Orchestra - The Columbia Stereo Collection 1964-1983 [94CDs Box Set] (2024)
MP3 320 Kbps | Run Time: 03:14:07:35 | 11.7 Gb
Genre: Classical | Label: Sony Classical

This massive new reissue from Eugene Ormandy’s stereo discography collects all the Columbia Masterworks recordings he made in Philadelphia between the early 1960s and early 1980s. Sony Classical’s new 94-CD box set once again demonstrates what noted critic Jed Distler, reviewing the previous instalment of this ambitious project “The Columbia Stereo Collection 1958–1963” in Gramophone’s December 2023 issue, characterized as “the Philadelphia Orchestra’s brilliance and versatility as well as Ormandy’s unflappable consistency and habitually underestimated interpretative gifts”. Some of these performances – including the complete recording of Bach’s St. John Passion, Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis, Schubert’s Sixth Symphony and a disc of opera choruses with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, as well as Ginastera’s Concerto for Strings and the ballet music from Massenet’s opera Le Cid – have never appeared before in the digital medium, and they shine a light into new corners of Ormandy’s astonishingly large repertoire.