O contrabaixista e compositor Manoel Cruz traz uma boa notícia para os apreciadores da música instrumental e do jazz. Seu saboroso álbum “Brazilian News” revela uma influência que o distingue do que tem se produzido majoritariamente na cena musical brasileira, nos últimos anos.

Coupling powerful interpretations with path-breaking scholarship, the choir Contrapunctus presents music by the best-known composers as well as unfamiliar masterpieces. Directed by Owen Rees, a specialist in music of the 16th and 17 centuries, the group presents imaginative programmes revealing previously undiscovered musical treasures and throwing new light on familiar works.

The richness and splendour of French Baroque sacred music, by turns gravely sombre and spectacularly exuberant, have already been amply demonstrated by Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel through their series of recordings on Glossa of music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. But it was not just in Paris or in the country’s religious foundations that such involved music-making was called upon, but also in cities such as Troyes and Châlons-sur-Marne where Pierre Bouteiller, maître de musique in cathedrals there during the reign of Louis XIV, composed his Missa pro defunctis, a beautiful setting scored for five voice parts with instrumental accompaniment.

Karina Gauvin…is comfortably able to get the better of Vivaldi's coloratura, athletic intervals and ornaments….Gauvin offers…[an] affecting performance of two motets, one of them, 'Sum in medio tempestatum' a real rarity in performance.

–BBC Music

The Mozart Requiem is one of the best-known sacred works in the classical repertoire. It was the composer's last work, and he left it unfinished at his death. British conductor Roger Norrington, a pioneer of authentic performing practice, and an outstanding group of singers present Duncan Druce's version of the Requiem, based on the latest Mozart research, together with other moving choral works.

Just how engaging, catchy, lively, and artful can 13th century Spanish music be? Very, as evidenced by this collection of motets, conductus, mass movements, and strophic songs from the legendary manuscript compiled at the 12th-century Cistercian convent at Las Huelgas. This remarkable program, highlighting only a handful of the nearly 200 works contained in the original manuscript, shows not only the beauty and inventiveness of sacred music of this period, but also how colorful and varied it could be.

Like Willaert, Cipriano de Rore was one of the great Flemish composers who spent their entire career in Italy.
Although better known for his madrigals, he also wrote this Mass based on the Christmas motet by Josquin Desprez Praeter rerum seriem (Beyond all human understanding, the Virgin Mary conceived the Son of Man).

The Huelgas Ensemble under Paul Van Nevel are numbered among the world’s best vocal ensembles for over 40 years. Their recordings of, in many cases, completely unknown works has earned the ensemble the highest international acclaim. The press wrote of their last recording: “The Huelgas Ensemble once again demonstrates its artistic skill and expressive power” (SWR 2). For their new album, Paul Van Nevel has selected outstanding works by Huguenot composers of the 16th century, a period when Protestants were ruthlessly persecuted in pre-revolutionary France. The tragic height of this persecution was the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre on the night of 23–24 August 1572, when the lives of thousands of Huguenots were taken.

La Oreja de Zurbarán – Zurbarán. The title chosen by Paul Van Nevel to illustrate the programme of this disc is a clear indication of his intentions – to bring to life the music that the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664) would have heard in the course of a career that led him from Seville to Madrid. Through an anthology of sacred and secular works, many of them hitherto unpublished, fluctuating from archaism and modernity, Paul Van Nevel and his Huelgas Ensemble seek to show how music and painting stem from one and the same vision of the world. Thus presenting the listener-viewer with the keys for an understanding of a period in which the watchword was ‘mysticism’.

Maluma has officially revealed the album cover and track list for 11:11, coining the announcement as a “very special day” on social media.

A treasure-house of the grand master of sixteenth-century musical calligraphy, the choirbooks of Petrus Alamire contain some stupendous and hitherto unpublished polyphonic works. Through the hand of the dedicated humanist that was Alamire – famous as a “guardian of the books” and as a spy within the most influential courts of the Renaissance, including those of Marguerite of Austria in Malines, Henry VIII of England and Charles V – the Huelgas Ensemble and Paul Van Nevel trace a portrait of this brilliant humanist in a programme that will take you to the very heart of the secrets of Renaissance polyphony. From among these gems that are the prestigious choirbooks, the voices of Paul Van Nevel portray The Legacy of Petrus Alamire through the Sanctus and Agnus Dei of such exceptional composers as Sticheler in an echo of the divine Josquin.

A hitherto little-known manuscript now in the Czech National Library contains a Missa defunctorum by Caldara that comprises the first three sections of the Requiem liturgy (the Introit, Kyrie and Sequence). Nothing is known about the origins of the music or how it ended up in Prague, but it probably dates from the Venetian’s long years of service at the Habsburg court in Vienna (and it is known that he deputised for his boss Fux at the coronation of Emperor Charles VI in Prague in 1723).

A printed version of the Motets for 2 or 3 voices Op. 4 was published in Bologna in 1715. Although Caldara was at this time still in the services of Marquis Ruspoli, he dedicated this collection to Cardinal Ottoboni who had gained a wide-ranging reputation as a patron of music during the previous decades. Caldara was appointed as imperial assistant music director in Vienna in 1716. As the favourite composer of Charles VI, Caldara was entrusted with the regular production of music for representative events at the imperial court for the remainder of his life.

Giaches de Wert (1536‐1595) was born in Flanders. He became one of the foremost composers of the Golden Age of Renaissance vocal polyphony, together with other illustrious composers: Dufay, Ockeghem, Obrecht, Josquin and Lassus. At an early age he went to Italy, where he became Maestro di Cappella of the Santa Barbara Basilica of Mantua, built by Guglielmo Gonzaga, head of the ruling family who were central in the development of the high cultural climate of Mantua. De Wert’s music is firmly rooted in the stately Franco‐Flemish polyphonic tradition, in which he introduced “Italian” elements expressing the emotional content of the text, such as sadness, sorrow, joy and exaltation. This new recording contains the First Book of Motets, a first recording, sung by one of the foremost Early Music Choirs of The Netherlands, the Collegium Musicum Amsterdam, conducted by Anthony Zielhorst.

Discover the music of Heinrich Isaac with these authentic performances from La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Hespèrion XXI under the inspired direction of early music specialist Jordi Savall. This program paints a portrait of an era during which the Hundred Year's War ended, the Medici family reached its peak, the idea of the Reformation surged and Charles V was crowned at the head of an Empire that redefined the idea of Europe.