Tractus

On the death of Anne of Brittany, her husband King Louis XII honoured her with exceptional funeral ceremonies lasting forty days, which sealed forever her image as Queen of France and Duchess of Brittany. As he prepared this programme centring on the Missa pro defunctis of Antoine de Févin, and read the exceptionally vivid narrative by the herald of Anne of Brittany (whom her subjects nicknamed simply ‘Bretaigne’!), Denis Raisin Dadre realised that beyond all this official mourning staged by the royal authority, there was also a silent sorrow, that of the Bretons who had lost their duchess and were also in the process of losing their duchy’s independence.

German men's vocal sextet Die Singphoniker was established in the early '80s and has made it its mission to take on a promiscuous variety of music, including plainsong, the repertoires of music for men's voices of the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern eras, as well as folk song and American popular song. In this album the group brings its commitment to diversity to new level. Taking Pierre de la Rue's Requiem, Missa pro fidelibus defunctis (ca. 1506) as its central work, the group intersperses its seven movements with a wild variety of other pieces, including the spiritual Deep River; a movement from Weill's Berliner Requiem; German folk songs; contemporary pieces by Einojuhani Rautavaara, Knut Nystedt, and Hans Schanderl; and arrangements of songs by Sting and Eric Clapton.

In Paradisum combines music from three sources: the Officium Defunctorum of Victoria, polyphony by Palestrina and Gregorian chant from a 17th century manuscript. Placing the work of the Spanish and Italian religious composers in a historically authentic context, the Hilliard Ensemble also give us a sense of the overwhelming musical experience that the Catholic Mass was at the time of the Renaissance.

After the great success of their first disc for Arcana featuring two unpublished masterpieces by Pergolesi, which won the ‘Diapason Découverte’ award, Giulio Prandi and the Coro e Orchestra Ghislieri return with a new recording, devoted to Niccolò Jommelli’s Requiem. Composed in 1756 for the solemn obsequies of the Duke of Württemberg’s mother, it became the most popular Requiem setting in Europe until Mozart’s, written in 1791.

When musicological research fails from the outset because it finds the deed but not the slightest clue as to the perpetrator, then we have to surrender completely to the listening experience and forget the unknowns. This is also the case with Missa solennis, which a certain Ioannes Cuisean composed for the people of Cologne as commissioned for the Feast of St. Gereon in 1663. Did the composer have something to do with the Strasbourg Cathedral because the only copy of the work survived there? No one knows. This has motivated the Cologne-based Josquin Capella, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2024, to make a grand event of this piece, which is as enigmatic as it is beautiful. Framed and interspersed with organ pieces by his – anything but unknown – contemporary Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667), a liturgy of magnificent sound is created with no need for further "research".