Credo Magazine

This disc is a tour de force, a world premiere recording of stunning music splendidly performed. The unjustly obscure Antonio Maria Bononcini was appointed late in life to be maestro di cappella in Modena, a post which allowed him to pour his store of invention into two grand sacred works, a Mass and a Stabat Mater. Conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini engages deeply with the composer’s imagination, opening up his dense counterpoint and delicately binding together his vocal and obbligato lines. The musical rhetoric of the Concerto Italiano is spellbinding, particularly when band and singers heighten gestures to surge powerfully towards a passage’s final cadence. However heated their delivery becomes – and the Stabat Mater does sizzle – the artists never rush. This is particularly crucial for bringing out Bononcini’s modulations and textures, which, because they shift rapidly, need space to breathe.

The Codice di Staffarda is a musical codex from Staffarda Abbey (Santa Maria di Staffarda), a Cistercian monastery located near Saluzzo in north-west Italy. The codex includes works by composers including the otherwise unknown Engarandus Juvenis and Antoine Brumel.

Un Diapason d'or en 2001 puis une discographie comparée ont déjà chanté l'aisance, l'humour et les voluptés des solistes et du chœur de Marcus Creed dans l'ultime chef-d'œuvre de Rossini. Retrouvez ce nouveau CD de la collection Les Indispensables de Diapason avec le numéro de juin de votre magazine.

The legendary Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was born 300 years ago, in 1710. To mark the anniversary, Naïve re-issues three renowned recordings to feature his choral music, in a specially-priced box set, headed by the Gramophone award-winning version of his Stabat Mater by Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano, considered one of the best ever recorded.

The Dunedin Consort's recording of Bach's Mass in B Minor revisits the spectacular individual virtuosity that made the Messiah recording so successful. This is the premiere recording of the work in the new Breitkopf edition, edited by Joshua Rifkin, a leading thinker in authentic period performance, who fully endorses John Butt's interpretation.

Ana Moura is universally acknowledged as one of the finest fado singers of the present generation. Her plaintive, smoky vocals has garnereda loyal European following, including members of The Rolling Stones. Whether starkly declaiming or swirling into filigreed crescendos of emotion, Ana's burnished alto personifies fado's darkly sensual credo of wisdom born of pain, grace, and futility, and secual passion perpetually on simmer, despite repeated and increasingly bitter betrayals.