Monteverdi Second Vespers For The Feast of Santa Barbara Harry Christophers

This recording takes us on a fantasy choral journey using the traditional services of Vespers and Benediction as its guide. It weaves hypnotic plainchant around renaissance gems and modern masterpieces. The music of the great Renaissance masters, Palestrina, Guerrero and Anerio sit alongside distinctive voices from the twenty-first century: James MacMIllan, Julian Anderson, John Joubert, Sven-David Sandström and Matthew Martin.

This recording presents a liturgical reconstruction of the Vigil for the Feast of St Joseph, the monastery founder. The music on this disc consists of 17th century chant originating from a collection of manuscripts originating from the library of the Volokolamsk Monastery, with other early manuscripts from between 1540 to 1560 and one from around 1670 being used to aid with the reconstruction. The Volokolamsk monastery library originally contained a collection of 48 chant manuscripts which provide crucial documentation of Russian chant from between the 15th to 17th centuries.

Celestial music and a celestial performance: Paul McCreesh's ingenious construction of a Mass for the Feast of St. Iisidore of Seville, as it might have been celebrated in Toledo Cathedral around 1590, deserves to be called a resplendent sonic and spiritual feast...

It must have been difficult to find a suitable programme to follow the Gabrieli Consort’s triumphant recording of Victoria’s Requiem (Archiv, 12/95), but with this disc of Morales’s Missa Mille regretz this has certainly been achieved, and with a logical connection to the previous release.

Hungaraton's Codex Sanblasianus: Medieval Mass for the Feast of the Annunciation is a rather mysterious entry for a number of reasons. One will look in vain for the title "Codex Sanblasianus" anywhere outside the context of this disc, and that raises a red flag as to exactly what manuscript János Mezei and the Schola Cantorum Budapestiensis is referring. It is British Museum Add. 27630, a South German manuscript from the second half of the fourteenth century.