Soli Art

Now, completing Jochum’s entire recorded legacy on DG and Philips, comes Jochum’s Complete Opera and Choral Recordings. These 38 CDs include creative and insightful bonus content, original jacket presentation plus a newly-remastered and new-to-DG CD set of Wagner’s Lohengrin with the sensational yet little-known Lorenz Fehenberger, described by Sir Georg Solti as, “one of the most extraordinary tenor talents I have ever worked with.” This latter operatic addition to the catalogue also becomes a stand-alone digital album. Social tools and a trailer will be announced shortly. Booklet notes include an introduction by Jochum’s daughter who clearly understood her father’s art and musicianship.

One of the supreme monuments of western sacred music, the Mass in B minor has been constantly reexamined by successive generations of performers. The questions it raises for musicologists and conductors are many and varied; each of them strives to give his or her own reading with the necessary humility. It was in this frame of mind that William Christie tackled the work in the course of a memorable tour in 2016.

This recording of Messiah by the Dunedin Consort is based on a reconstruction of the original version premiered in Dublin in 1742. The Dublin version is rarely performed because the composer had simplified parts in deference to the vocal limitations of some of the local soloists, because it is not as complete as later versions of the score and because revisions Handel made after the first performance have become standard. This recording also seeks to duplicate the original performing forces as authentically as possible by having the soloists perform the choruses, as well, using a total of only 12 singers. The result is remarkably and refreshingly intimate. In spite of the modesty of scale, conductor John Butt leads a reading that never sounds small or limited; the performers convey the full extent of the work's wide emotional range.

Soli Deo Gloria is proud to release the last instalment of its successful Brahms Symphony series which sees John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique explore the music of Johannes Brahms. This album is a celebration of the Fourth Symphony and the various pieces that contributed to its making.

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.

For more than forty years, Lalande was the French court’s favourite composer, cultivating the most elevated and touching aspects of the spirit of the Grand Siècle. Sébastien Daucé and the Ensemble Correspondances offer us some remarkable examples of his output here: with the imposing Miserere, ample and sombre, the Dies irae and the rarely heard Veni Creator, this ‘Latin Lully’ brought the art of the grand motet to its zenith.