Scumann Missa Sacra

The Brabant Ensemble continue their investigation into unknown jewels of the Low Countries Renaissance, researched by their director Stephen Rice and recorded with equal amounts of passion and erudition by the young singers of the group.

At the Collegiate Church in Stuttgart, the largest regional church in Württemberg (South Germany), and burial site of the Dukes of Württemberg, who lived in the neighbouring castle, a new organist was appointed in 1652: Philipp Friedrich Böddecker (1607-1683). His Sacra Partitura, a collection of eight motets and two sonatas, was printed in Strasbourg in 1651, when his negotiation with the church council had already begun. These compositions might have been decisive for Böddeckers appointment, particularly as the composer dedicated the collection to the Dukes musical sister, Duchess Sibylla. The music is composed in typical concertante style, but influenced by Italian monody and Monteverdis seconda pratica.

Vivaldi, the Venetian: master of the whole palette of human emotions. From the church to the opera house, from tragedy to joy, the immediately recognizable sensibility, the expressiveness, the inimitable colors and an unbeatable talent to say so much in just a few notes. The contralto Delphine Galou (who recently won a Gramophone Award, one of the most prestigious awards in the classical music world) and Ottavio Dantone's Accademia Bizantina have created two recitals of sacred music and of opera that illustrate the incomparable richness of Vivaldi’s body of work and establish the emotional connections between the two repertoires.

Niccolò Jommelli was one of the most sought after composers of his time, but finally accepted to become musical director at the court of Stuttgart in 1753. Three years later he composed his Requiem to commemorates the recent death of the Duchess von Württemberg, mother of his patron, the Duke Carl Eugen.. Despite the fact that Jommelli owed his fame almost exclusively to his operas during his lifetime, the Requiem became his most famous work after his death; the almost one hundred handwritten and printed copies of the entire work or fragments of it that have survived in some seventy libraries throughout Europe, some also in the USA, bear witness to this. Whilst the score and parts of the first performance have been lost, we can still form a reasonably good idea of the original instrumentation thanks to a surviving list of payments made to the musicians. We know that there were eight singers (one female and seven male) in addition to Jommelli.

Agricola - Missa Malheur me bat, Missa In minen sin - A:N:S Chorus & János Bali (2001) {Hungaroton Classic HCD32011}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 348 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 185 Mb
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© 2001 Hungaroton Classic | HCD 32011
Classical / Renaissance / Sacred / Early Music

First recording. .. or the more colloquial "s__t happens" is as good a translation of the phrase "malheur me bat" as any. It's the title of a chanson of the late 15th Century. The rest of the text hasn't survived. We can assume that the chanson was a love lament, but not with any certainty; it might have been a general statement of the woes of mortality. Written in the Phrygian mode (E to e with no flats of sharps), it does have a melodically woeful cast. Polyphony in the Phrygian mode was not unusual, but it always involved the compositional difficulty of avoiding the "tritone" (the interval from F-natural to B-natural), so that raising the F or lowering the B (a practice we call ficta) often disguises the modal quality of the music.

The modern-day appreciation of Francesco Bartolomeo Conti takes a decisive turn in the direction of his church music with this early eighteenth-century composers Missa Sancti Pauli given an ideal recording on Glossa by György Vashegyi, the Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra. Conti was a Florentine who worked for much of his career in the Imperial Court in Vienna, generating much attention there the ever-observant JS Bach and Zelenka were both known to have been attracted by his music.