Dominique Lorents

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.’

"If There Are Mountains" is the first album by Dave Douglas and Elan Mehler as co-leaders, setting poetry and specifically haiku within the context of improvising music.

Founded in Paris in 1978 the Ensemble Clément Janequin devotes itself principally to the secular and religious music of the Renaissance. Its interpretations of the Parisian chanson are regarded as authoritative, and recordings of works like Les Cris de Paris, Le Chant des Oyseaulx, Fricassée Parisienne and La Chasse have brought back to life one of golden ages of French music. Now available to a wide audience, the music of Janequin, Sermisy, Anthoine de Bertrand, Costeley, Roland de Lassus and Claude Le Jeune illustrates the contrasts in which the Renaissance took such delight…

Since founding the group in 1979, Dominique Vellard has spent 35 years inspiring the Ensemble Gilles Binchois to create some of the essential contributions in the field of medieval music and the Renaissance performance. This new recording gives us the opportunity to discover the vocal music of composer Heinrich Isaac, whose brilliant compositions are both generous and captivating. Vellard leads the Ensemble Gilles Binchois in Isaac's Missa Virgo Prudentissima, performed using a manuscript preserved in the Dome of Florence.

Le "codex Las Huelgas" qui a été récemment daté des années 1340, rassemble 186 chants liturgiques et para-liturgiques dont L'Ensemble Gilles Binchois présente une sélection. La musique du Moyen âge n'existe aujourd'hui que grâce au précieux travail de musiciens comme Dominique Vellard qui s'emploient à donner vie au répertoire liturgique des monastères anciens. Aux quatre coins de l'Europe médiévale, des manuscrits - ou codex - consignaient les chants des offices.

Original melodies by pianist and composer Louis Dominique Roy get their first airing on Rêves enclos, a new recording with baritone Olivier Laquerre. Roy’s songs are set to poems by some of Québec’s greatest poets, including Émile Nelligan, Alfred DesRochers, Arthur de Bussières, Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau, and Gilles Vigneault. The composer accompanies Laquerre on these Québécois melodies, several of which also feature Sébastien Lépine, cello, and Louis-Philippe Marsolais, horn.

Alessandro Grandi was most of the prolific composers of the time. His motets were popular and widely performed throughout Europe. Particularly in this motteti a voce sola, he used all the stylistic innovations that were being developed in secular music at that time.

What you get on this release by veteran countertenor Dominique Visse and the Capella de la Torre is something less accessible than what is suggested by the Vinum et Musica title but more accessible than the pedantic subtitle "Songs & dances from Nuremberg sources (15th & 16th century)." The collection of pieces here is a sort of tour of the city of Nuremberg, an important German city in Renaissance times but not one that was home to its own compositional school.