Cantus

Rebecca Stewart together with the vocal ensemble Seconda Pract!ca explores the music of Josquin Desprez and his contemporaries Brumel and Willaert, commemorating the 500th anniversary of his death. The central piece of this recording is the famous Missa Mater patris by Josquin. Founded in 2012 by international musicians gathered in The Netherlands for their studies, Seconda Prat!ca has become one of the leading ensembles of the new generation of early music performers. The ensemble’s main goal is to bridge the gaps between performers and audience, revitalizing western musical heritage by bringing it back to a shared living experience.

Germany's Konrad Junghänel identifies himself primarily as a lutenist, and it was in that capacity that he first became known for sheer virtuosity combined with mastery of style and ornamentation technique. His lute repertory, centered on the German Baroque standards of Silvius Leopold Weiss (whose complete works he has recorded to critical and prize-committee acclaim) and J.S. Bach, numbers some 100 pieces, and he has served as soloist or as part of the continuo group (on various stringed instruments, including theorbo) with top-level historical-performance groups such as La Petite Bande and Les Arts Florissants, as well as his hometown Musica Antiqua Köln.

The 17th-century Austrian composer Heinrich Biber is remembered today for his extraordinary solo violin music–collections such as the Mystery Sonatas. He wrote a number of large-scale instrumental works and choral pieces as well, but their reputation is not as high. They include a lot of grand gestures for brass, but they tend to be harmonically static and often seem long-winded. So Konrad Junghänel and his superb musicians have really achieved something by making the works on this disc sound so appealing.