Petre

Born in the countryside and working in a port town on the coast of the Black Sea, Romanian wedding violinist Ion Petre Stoican wanted to break into the Bucharest market, which was dominated by a coterie of influential lautari families. He'd tried working there once before but it was hard to build a reputation for yourself when you were just another musician in from the provinces. Luck came unexpectedly when he noticed a man behaving in a suspicious way and handed him over to the police. The man turned out to be a foreign spy. By way of a reward, Stoican was given the chance to record an album with the state-operated label, Electrecord. "The most important Gypsy musicians from the Bucharest Lautari scene" (to quote the CD case) became his backing band, and the album had the effect that he must have hoped for: he made his reputation in Bucharest and played there until the end of the '80s. He died not long after the fall of Ceauşescu in 1989.

El renombre de Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) y la extraordinaria calidad de su música, ha ensombrecido a grandes figuras de la polifonía española del esplendoroso siglo XVI. Un siglo que se iniciaba con maestros de la talla de Anchieta y Peñalosa, seguía con Morales y Guerrero para culminar con Victoria, Ambrosio Cotes y Alonso Lobo.
Este último es, sin duda, uno de los más grandes, y aunque no se implicó en las novedades aportadas por la naciente homofonía o la policoralidad del barroco, su arte supo asimilar las nuevas propuestas expresivas, siempre con un dominio de la trama vocal equiparable al de los mejores polifonistas de su época.

This is one of the monuments of recorded music, a magnificent undertaking. Everything Moroney touches comes up sparkling; it is perfect in every detail: musical, academic, technical, you name it.
This disc received the 2000 Gramophone magazine award for "Best Early Music Recording."

Don’t forget Early Music Day on March 21st! We will celebrate this year with digital premieres of two beautiful albums. Pedro Memelsdorff is a renowned musicologist who founded the ensemble Mala Punica. With them he intensively explored the music of the Italian Trecento during his partnership with Erato, leading to three albums we’ve gathered under the title Gothic Italy. These recordings include the complete motets of Ciconia, a Flemish composer who settled in Padua and was one of the most important figures of the ars subtilior. Then, the complete songs - mostly in French - by the very innovative Matteo da Perugia, one of the first ever composers to put instrumental recommendations in his scores. These are coupled with a Missa cantilena, a parody mass made up by Memelsdorff after sacred or adapted profane pieces from various Italian 15th-century codices, which is an absolute splendor!

Active in Venice and Padua at the beginning of the 15th century, Johannes Ciconia was undoubtedly the most important composer of this transitional period. Born in Liège and trained in the principles of the French and Italian Ars Nova, he played a considerable role in the musical development that led little by little towards the Renaissance.

Most of Ciconia’s eight surviving motets are dedicated to prominent Paduan and Venetian dignitaries of the time, including three bishops of Padua, a Venetian doge, and cardinal Francesco Zabarella, Ciconia’s main Paduan patron. They constitute a highly solemn repertory in which virtuoso singing hides and at the same time reveals complex and fascinating musical structures. Sidus preclarum presents Ciconia's motets in a blend of four to six singers and four to five instrumentalists.

The Network Media Cooperative (Network Medien-Cooperative) was founded in October 1979 – by April 1990 we had already issued 19 titles, at the time as audio-cassettes with a comprehensive booklet in a small package that looked like a chocolate box. The covers and layouts were produced using Letraset on a light-table installed over a bath tub. Among those first records were the musical themes that were to preoccupy us for 30 years: an extensive document of the “Gypsies Music Festival”; meanwhile the music of the Roma has been documented on numerous Network CDs, including the anthology “Road of the Gypsies” (often copied but never achieving the same level). A double musíccasette packet was devoted to cult music from Haiti and the sounds and life philosophy of the Rastafarians in Jamaica. Recording trips were undertaken, among others, to Cuba, Trinidad, St. Lucia, and Curacao, but also to Latin America, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Belize. We also approached the music worlds of Africa in our portrait of the South African pianist and vocalist Dollar Brand (today Abdullah Ibrahim) and in the first studio recordings of Soukous music. These were followed by trips to Liberia, Senegal, Mali, Tanzania, Zanzibar.