Engel Gregorian

In celebration of their 20th anniversary, Gregorian, the most successful choir worldwide, return with their 2019 album "20/2020". "20/2020" is filled with 32 songs on with the special Gregorian touch, stunning vocals and majestic instrumentals. 11 brand new interpretations of current chart hits like Alan Walker's "Faded", Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" and "Say Something" by A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera can be found alongside newly recorded, timeless versions of classics such as "Blowing In The Wind" and "Mary, Did You Know" as well as the brand new Gregorian original "20 Years".
Additionally, Gregorian take fans on a fantastic journey across all genres and decades on their additional Best Of, including reworked versions of their most beloved classics such as "Moment Of Peace", "The Sound Of Silence", "Masters Of Chant", "Join Me" and many more.

This spectacular set features a quintessential selection of western sacred music that that will please one and all, from an inquisitive novice to a discerning connoisseur. It features a vast array of critically acclaimed recordings of more than seventy cornerstone works, ranging from the earliest Christian chants to gospel songs and Gershwin's blues. The performers include some of today's finest artists, including René Jacobs, Philippe Herreweghe, Paul Hillier and William Christie. Offered at a special low price, this limited edition set is packaged in a luxury clamshell style box containing 29 discs of music and one PDF disc with sung texts.

This 55-CD set chronicles the remarkable Archiv label, begun in 1947. Devoted mainly to early and Baroque music, the recordings presented here, in facsimiles of their original sleeves (a nice touch), cover the period from Gregorian chant to Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, played on period instruments. There are stops in between for a great deal of Bach, music of the Gothic era, the French Baroque (Mouret, Delalande, Rameau, etc), Gibbons, Handel (Alcina, La Resurrezione, Messiah, Italian cantatas), Telemann, Zelenka, Gabrieli, Desprez, Haydn, LeJeune, and plenty of the usual, as well as unusual, suspects. There’s also a final CD with selections of new releases (more Handel, Cavalli, Gesualdo, Vivaldi).

This year the Bremen Cathedral Choir is celebrating its 150th anniversary, and with its director of many years, Wolfgang Helbich, it also has certainly enjoyed a »musical marriage« of a rare kind. And then there is the splendid Bremen tradition that has been observed for some eighty years now: the Christmas song concert in St. Peter’s Cathedral so very dear to the hearts of the Bremen public. Since cpo, as a label with its home in Northern Germany, has long maintained close ties to the Hansa city (cf. Radio Bremen, Weser-Renaissance Bremen, and not least Helbich himself), it seemed to us to be high time to document this event full of the Christmas spirit for the pleasure of a wider listening audience. Everything that lends the Christmas season its musical magic is represented in traditional arrangements, from Adeste Fideles to Vom Himmel hoch.

This 50 CD Box Set includes Archiv Produktions finest analogue recordings made between 1959 and 1981, representing a Golden Age of a pioneering label that defined the way early music should be performed and recorded. Featured artists include Karl Richter, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Pierre Fournier, John Eliot Gardiner, Trevor Pinnock and other icons of the Archiv label.

Following on from and designed along the same lines as the Guide to Period Instruments, this boxed set includes an exhaustive introductory text as well as a great quantity of music excerpts on the set’s eight CDs. These extracts have been taken from the extensive repertoire recorded by Ricercar over many years, with excerpts from recordings kindly provided by our colleagues from Harmonia Mundi, Gimell, Accent, Alpha and Sony supplementing our programme where necessary. The Lutheran repertoire of the Renaissance has remained for all intents and purposes unrecorded up until now; the tracks illustrating this repertoire together with other excerpts have been recorded specially for this compilation by Vox Luminis.