Cantus

Pedro de Escobar (c. 1465-c.1535) was a composer of the same renaissance generation as Josquin, Isaac, Mouton and De La Rue. He was born in Porto, Portugal but was of Castilian ancestry; his work was in great demand in his time and he spent part of his working life in Spain, much of this in the service of the Catholic Queen Isabella I. His best-known works today are a Requiem Mass (recorded twice so far), a Magnificat setting and a handful of motets, but this present CD brings us the first recording of a complete ordinary Mass setting, simply titled ‘Missa 4v.’

What happens when traditional Sami music meets mainstream western sacred music? This is the question Cantus meets head-on in Spes. Under the direction of its conductor Tove Ramlo-Ystad, and in collaboration with composer and musician Frode Fjellheim, the choir explores a new and little-known musical world, a world with a wide range of emotions: sorrow, joy and vulnerability. Through these songs, sounds and musical forms - some familiar, others scarcely known - Cantus challenges both itself and its audience with a repertoire which, while being striking in its variety, is united in one thing: its expression of hope in the music by Frode Fjellheim, Mia Makaroff, Eriks Esenvalds, Eva Ugalde, Ko Matsushita, Knut Nystedt, Franz Xaver Biebl and Kim André Arnesen.

Das Vokalensemble Cantus Cölln unter der Leitung von Konrad Junghänel gehört heute zu den renommiertesten Formationen seiner Art. Die über 30 CD-Einspielungen von Cantus Cölln wurden mit zahlreichen internationalen Preisen ausgezeichnet und umfassen musikalische Raritäten ebenso wie wegweisende Interpretationen von "Klassikern" des barocken Repertoires.

What happens when traditional Sami music meets mainstream western sacred music? This is the question Cantus meets head-on in Spes. Under the direction of its conductor Tove Ramlo-Ystad, and in collaboration with composer and musician Frode Fjellheim, the choir explores a new and little-known musical world, a world with a wide range of emotions: sorrow, joy and vulnerability. Through these songs, sounds and musical forms - some familiar, others scarcely known - Cantus challenges both itself and its audience with a repertoire which, while being striking in its variety, is united in one thing: its expression of hope in the music by Frode Fjellheim, Mia Makaroff, Eriks Esenvalds, Eva Ugalde, Ko Matsushita, Knut Nystedt, Franz Xaver Biebl and Kim André Arnesen.

Belonging to the same tradition as the celebrated Weihnachtshistorie of his teacher Schütz, these sacred concertos by Rosenmüller date from the period 1645-50, when the young composer was enjoying a rapid rise to eminence in the good city of Leipzig. Long before his enforced exile in Venice for ‘unnatural vice’, a typically Italian suavity is already clearly perceptible all through these remarkable settings of St Luke’s account of the Nativity. Cantus Cölln returns here to its favourite repertoire, eight years after a first release devoted to the same composer’s Vesper music.

Since the additional movements of the Roman Catholic Mass (Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Credo) that appear in his B minor Mass were excluded, Bach's four missa breves (short masses) are essentially two-movement Lutheran works. Naturally, Bach being Bach, he subdivided the expansive Gloria into five shorter movements; set the texts as arias, duets, and choruses; and used an orchestra ensemble including strings, flutes, oboes, trumpets, and organ as a powerful and colorful accompaniment. But at the heart of all four works is the austere faith of Martin Luther, and the German reformer's strength, severity, and occasional sentimentality is at the spiritual core of Bach's sacred music.

Although most of Heinrich Schütz's surviving music is for the church, his first published work was this set of Italian madrigals–a remarkable collection of pieces that perfectly capture the style while continually throwing off sparks of originality. Dedicated to a patron back in Germany who funded his two-year study in Venice with the great master, Giovanni Gabrieli, these 19 madrigals are rich in imagery and occasionally make tantalizingly brief forays into harmonic territory reminiscent of Gesualdo.