Orto

2008 fifteen CD set, the most complete anthology ever from the Italian master composer, released to coincide with the maestro's 80th birthday. This 15 disc set includes only original versions of his best works grouped into seven different categories, all selected by Morricone himself. The discs include: Music For Cinema (nine CDs containing 168 of his best themes in chronological order), Music For Television (two CDs containing 38 themes), Contemporary Classical Music (one CD containing 18 tracks), Original Songs (one CD containing 18 songs he composed for well-known Pop artists), Orchestral Arrangements (one CD containing 16 of his best arrangements) and Hit Song Arrangements (one CD containing 16 Pop hits he arranged in the '60s for Italian artists including rarities, remixes and more).

As with Bach’s The Art of Fugue performed by the Berlin Saxophone Quartet (9990582), this is an alternate interpretation of some early music, this time it’s the music of the Renaissance. Music by composers such as Palestrina, Dowland, Gabrielli, Frescobaldi, Desprez and many more have been arranged for four saxophones.

The general trend in recordings of Renaissance polyphony has been toward typing music to specific surroundings: royal festivities, religious feast days, and the like. This collection by the Huelgas Ensemble goes in the other direction, providing three CDs' worth of music ranging from the medieval era to Anton Bruckner, with most of the pieces falling into some stretch of the High Renaissance. The music was recorded, beautifully, in a Romanesque church near Dijon in 2018, and the program is unified loosely by a set of general guidelines for the selections at that event: the music emphasized "unknown repertoire, undeservedly obscure composers, and experiments that fall outside the scope of the normal concert season."