Church Catalogue

Signum Records are proud to re-release the landmark recording of Sir John Tavener’s 'The Veil of the Temple'. This 2CD set captures the concert-version of this 8-hour work, composed to last through the night until dawn in the manner of the grand vigils of the Orthodox Church. Combining the psalms of a number of different religious, Tavener skilfully blends together a work that is truly all-encompassing in its scale and spiritual fervour.

From the eleventh century, Venetian mariners gathered together once each year to offer prayers to San Nicolò, the patron saint of sailors, asking for his continued protection. Initially the service was a simple benediction in which the Adriatic Sea was blessed with holy water. By the late-sixteenth century the ceremony had evolved into one of the most lavish and important dates in the Venetian calendar. Ascension Day now launched a large spring festival which was headed by the symbolic wedding of Venice to the Adriatic—the Sposalizio.

In recent years there have been a number of recordings with music by Giacomo Carissimi. Many of these feature his oratorios which gave the composer his fame in his own time and in modern times also. There are recordings of his best-known oratorios, like Jephte, Ionas, Job.

This comprehensive two-volume catalogue covers the outstanding collection of English and French medieval stained glass in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Written by curator Jane Hayward, the catalogue is posthumously published as Part I in the Corpus Vitrearum USA series and represents the culmination of Hayward's pioneering work in the field, from the years immediately following World War II, when Hayward first journeyed to France to study medieval stained glass with Louis Grodecki and Jean Lafond, to the month before her death in 1994. …