Sistine Chapel

The Sistine Chapel Choir were quite late to the recording scene, but they are making up for lost time under director Massimo Palombella. The strengths of the choir's performances on this holiday release are threefold. First of all is the sound environment of the chapel itself, resonant and big, yet hospitable to dense polyphony since Josquin was a choirboy there. Josquin appears on the program here, but the motet Missus est Gabriel is not a common work, and that points to the choir's second strength: they work from a manuscript tradition, that of the Vatican, that is different from the set of scholarly publications that have long shaped the Renaissance performing repertory, and several pieces here are world premieres, or otherwise seldom heard.

Simply titled “Palestrina”, it is a new release by the world’s oldest choir – performed and recorded in the heart of the Catholic Church, and featuring works by the most celebrated Italian musician of his time and reformer of church music: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

Josquin des Prez - Music in the Sistine Chapel around 1490 - Cut Circle (2012) {2CD Set, Musique en Wallonie MEW 1265-1266}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 653 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 358 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 129 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2012 Musique En Wallonie ‎| MEW 1265-1266
Classical / Reneissance / Sacred / Mass

Аeatures sacred music by Renaissance composers living and working in Rome. Offers new interpretations of music by Josquin des Prez, including his famous Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales. Presents premiere recordings of works by Marbrianus de Orto, Gaspar van Weerbeke, and other scandalously understudied late fifteenth-century singer-composers employed in the newly built chapel of Pope Sixtus IV. In a space that overlooked frescoes by Botticelli and Perugino, they gathered around enormous choirbooks to sing one another’s masses, motets, and hymns. Cut Circle’s recording aims to capture the soundscape of the Sistine Chapel as Josquin knew it.

This series of state-of-the-art recordings by the Sistine Chapel Choir for Deutsche Grammophon makes an authoritative and profoundly beautiful case for the continuing relevance of Humanist, Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces in the Papal Celebrations of the 21stCentury, and in the wider world. This album breathes new contemporary life into a precious tradition at the highest artistic level and transfers its listeners into a meditative, peaceful and conscious state.