Sacred Communication

Founded in 2001 by tenor Benoît Haller, La Chapelle Rhénane is a musical ensemble of lyrical and instrumental soloists. The team is dedicated to the repertoire of great European vocal works. Its ambition is, through concerts and recordings, to reveal in these works the emotion, humanity and modernity that can seduce a wide contemporary audience. Just like the great European courts during the Baroque period who recruited their musicians across the continent – and to a lesser extent like the composers who never ceased to travel to complete their training and gain new experiences - la Chapelle Rhénane benefits from the central location of Strasbourg, attracting musicians from all over Europe.

This religious masterpiece, composed in memory of the great Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), has themes even more cosmic than any in Verdi's other operas: life and death, heaven and hell, the Christian vision of humanity's redemption, the end of the world, and the last judgment. Verdi's music rises to the tremendous demands of this subject matter; it is music of grandeur, guilt, terror, and consolation, with a breadth of vision and an intensity of feeling unique in the composer's work and in religious music. John Eliot Gardiner's is the first recording made with period instruments, a kind of performance that some musiclovers still dismiss as dilettantism, more concerned with musicological correctness than feeling and communication.

The technology at our command, the electronic images we see every day, the ease and swiftness of world travel and communication has left modern humans with a waning sense of awe. We can argue about who was or is better off, but for 17th century Europeans, awe-inspiring events happened with some regularity. Pageantry was one of the more effective and popular means to impress a congregation, and there was nothing like a huge celebration in a massive cathedral to remind each person of his place in the grand scheme.

The Dvorak Stabat Mater turned out to be the final recording made by the beloved dean of American choral directors, Robert Shaw, who taped it in Atlanta in November 1998, two months before his death, at 82.
In an interview with NPR's Martin Goldsmith that fills out the second disc of the Telarc set, Shaw describes the Stabat Mater as "a work of extraordinary vitality and almost mystical communication," qualities fully captured by his deeply felt performance. (Chicago Tribune)

Vivaldi's Dixit Dominus, RV 807, was added to the Vivaldi canon only in 2005; it was long attributed to Baldassare Galuppi. That shows you how minor composers don't get their due; it's a marvelous work, but it's only getting recordings now that Vivaldi's name is attached to it. At any rate, it's well worth hearing in this excellent performance by the rising British group La Nuova Musica, which has both vocal and instrumental components. They move like a well-oiled machine, making possible the clear communication of such vivid details as the musical depiction of a stream in the strings in the countertenor aria De torrente in via bibet (track 8) and the unusually elaborate fugue that concludes the work.

In a year of Handel celebration and many new recordings, this is a welcome addition to the discography. Stephen Layton, the Academy of Ancient Music, the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a stellar group of soloists—in fact, the best in solo Handel singing that this country has to offer—present a disc of three of the Chandos anthems which is sure to achieve the same critical and public acclaim as the recent Dettingen Te Deum from Trinity.