Exaudi

For the opening of the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, Krzysztof Penderecki set to music the text of the Ekecheiria (Truce) Agreement, agreed in 884 BC to ensure the peaceful running of the Games. In 2022, Munich celebrated and commemorated the 50th anniversary of the ""cheerful"" Games, which unfortunately ended in tragedy. In this context, Fumio Yasuda was commissioned to once again set Ekecheiria to music as a mirror of those events. The result is seven compositions for voices and bass clarinet based on IOC President Avery Brundage's controversial demand ""The Games Must Go On"", interspersed with sound bridges entitled ""Ekecheiria"" by Gareth Davis.

This CD contains a program devoted entirely to the figure of John Brudieu (Limoges, 1520? - La Seu d´Urgell 1591), one of the masters of Renaissance Europe and one of the most famous composers of the Catalonian countries. He was master of La Seu d´Urgell, where a Mass was conserved defunctorum cum Quator vocibus. That is a Requiem Mass for 4 voices, accompanied by two more songs. The three works can be framed in the ordinary of the mass for the dead: an input, a communion and one output. Thus establishing a synergy between the works and liturgical texts (in latin) to be modified by madrigals (in catalan). The group Exaudi We offer a quality recreation and beauty along with extraordinary career in Columna Musica.

James Weeks writes: “EXAUDI, long-established among the UK's leading vocal consorts, presents fresh readings of 19 of Gesualdo's madrigals from Books V and VI, combining rigorous stylistic understanding and tonal beauty with an overriding focus on the music's extreme expressive vision. The late madrigals of Gesualdo exert a strange and enduring fascination on the modern musical imagination. Listening today to these extraordinary messages of anguish and ecstasy, we are drawn back to his flame like lovers who can’t let go, into the warp of chromatic harmony, the emotional hyper-intensity and mysterious otherness of this most tantalising early Baroque figure.”

The highly reputed Mouret lit up the Duchess of Maine's festivities with his Divertissements en Musique before becoming the official composer of the Comedie-Italienne in 1717, then artistic director of the Concert Spirituel in 1728. The Ensemble la Francaise invites us to discover his music's spontaneity, lightness and grace, as well as its dramatic expressivity, through his Airs a Danser from the Premier Livre (1734) and Concert de Chambre from the Second Livre (1738), along with a selection of motets that he composed for the Concert Spirituel in 1730.