Cantate Domino

“O sing unto the Lord a new song.” What a beginning for a piece of choral music! If you’re a composer, it draws you like a magnet. And so it has proven throughout the centuries. Who knows, maybe you’ll write the definitive version. And, until someone figures out a way to copyright the Bible, it’s free! Putting together a compilation of settings by great composers was a natural idea, and here it is. But—beware! Everything is not as it seems.

Lovers of high-Renaissance polyphony will find much to enjoy with this new CPO release of works by the German composer Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612). Like his contemporary and friend Giovanni Gabrieli, Hassler’s advanced use of polychoral techniques (which would acheive ultimate fruition in the settings of Heinrich Schütz) earned him great fame and recognition in his day. While it’s unlikely that Hassler ever heard his music performed in a program like this, one that intersperses various combinations of solo, instrumental, and choral works, the performances nevertheless provide a fascinating musical glimpse into the work of this rarely recorded master.

Les Sonadori - Cantate Violini! (Florid early baroque songs & polyphony) (2019) {Passacaille 1056}
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© 2019 Passacaille | 1056
Classical / Renaissance / Early Baroque / Period Instruments

The most beautiful polyphonic canzoni, chansons, motets and madrigals, were used like today’s pop standards in the 16th century; musicians would improvise on them, tailoring their playing and imagination to each other. The colourful and varied selection of works on this recording is made up of different combinations of voices and instruments. A special aspect, a kind of renaissance violin band stands at the centre of this project: ensembles of violins were generally used to accompany certain moments in the Mass, at banquets, receptions, princely entertainments, entries into cities and palaces, diplomatic negotiations and sacred and secular processions as well as the long hours of dancing that followed the evening meal in northern Italy from the 1530s onwards, until the 1580s and 1590s announced the arrival of the new baroque style.

The highly reputed Mouret lit up the Duchess of Maine's festivities with his Divertissements en Musique before becoming the official composer of the Comedie-Italienne in 1717, then artistic director of the Concert Spirituel in 1728. The Ensemble la Francaise invites us to discover his music's spontaneity, lightness and grace, as well as its dramatic expressivity, through his Airs a Danser from the Premier Livre (1734) and Concert de Chambre from the Second Livre (1738), along with a selection of motets that he composed for the Concert Spirituel in 1730.