This is an ATMA Classique reissue of one of Les Violons du Roy’s seminal discs: the orchestra’s 2002 Dorian label recording of Mozart’s Requiem as revised and completed by Robert D. Levin. The recording won the JUNO® Award for Best Classical Album of the year in the Vocal or Choral Performance category. Founding conductor Bernard Labadie brought Les Violons du Roy and its the fifteen member core together in 1984. The ensemble specializes in the vast repertoire of music for chamber orchestra, performed on modern instruments but in a stylistic manner most appropriate to the work’s era.

Two rival yet similar works, an illustration of a “Quarrel of the Te Deums”, a true war of mottled violin scores, a frivolous echo of Louis XV‘s final victories. It is also the rediscovery of two of the most talented composers amongst Rameau’s contemporaries, François Colin de Blamont and Esprit Joseph Antoine Blanchard. Daniel Cuiller appropriates this music with the voracity which had led him to revive a previous Te Deum, on that occasion by Henri Madin, and which was covered with praise. Add to this the brilliant singers of the Marguerite Louise choir which is directed by Gaétan Jarry and the virtuoso musicians of Stradivaria, Daniel replied with enthusiasm to this “commission” for the Royal Chapel of Versailles.

Grands motets, requiring lavish vocal and instrumental resources, always signalled important occasions at the French court.
Until the advent of public concerts in Paris in the 1720s they were performed exclusively by the king's musicians for the court. Olivier Schneebeli has assembled an admirable survey of these large-scale settings of psalm texts, which were excerpted and arranged to convey doubles entendres flattering to Louis XIV and his policies. The music employs an orchestra with a full continuo complement, a choir and a petit choeur of soloists that relies on high male voices. The only concession to modern times is the use of sopranos instead of castrati in the top part and the inclusion of girls among the pages. The survey begins with Lully's first grandmotet, the Jubilate Deo (1660), celebrating both the marriage of the king and a peace treaty. The Miserere (1663), frequently performed during Lully's lifetime, has remained his best-known work.

Dissemination of bossa nova led. The knowledgable compilation "Wanted Bossa Nova" takes a look back at the dazzling history of the genre and presents stylistic elements Acts like Jorge Ben, Zélia Barbosa, Os Brazões, Orlandivo, Salinas, Antonio Carlos Jobim & Elis Regina, Trio Esperanca or Marisa Rossi with their most beautiful titles.

Collection includes 15 releases. Gregorian is a German band headed by Frank Peterson that performs gregorian chant-inspired versions of modern pop and rock songs. The band features both vocal harmony and instrumental accompaniment.

While many of the traditional Barry phrases and sonic textures can be heard throughout this score, there is no hint that the composer was resting on his laurels and doing a journeyman job. Rather, he chose to reach for new textures, inspired by plainchant and driven by the need to match the subtext in the film that involved the influence of the Catholic church on the lives and choices of the characters. Consequently, Barry's score shifts in the most fascinating way between regal fanfares and haunting chant, resulting in this score being possibly the best work Barry has ever done. The Legacy remastering does not add anything new, but the sound is considerably improved.

Carlo Gesualdo has become notorious, not only from his royalty but for the eccentricities of his life and music. Gruesomely murdering his first wife and her lover, mistreating his second wife and isolating himself have all fuelled the ""myth of Gesualdo as a madman"". Gesualdo turned his prodigious compositional talent to the creation of a collection of pieces that betray his obsession with his own personal sin. The five-voice motets on this release speak as strongly as Gesualdo's words ever could. The Marian Consort possesses both a lean vocal delivery and a robust interpretation of the texts.

Brazilian born guitarist composer and arranger Ricardo Peixoto brings us a mesmerizing collection of compositions, featuring players and ensembles from the San Francisco Bay Area and Rio de Janeiro. This new CD strikes a perfect balance between composition and improvisation weaving jazz and Brazilian music traditions with great writing and great soloists.

Este é um álbum de jazz com um toque brasileiro. Representa quem eu sou, de onde venho e para onde vou. É um encontro de Jazz, Bossa, Samba e Funk. Eu ofereço este álbum para minha mulher Marianna.

A partir de uma formação que inclui quarteto de cordas, flauta e banda, este single faz uma homenagem aos grandes nomes da música brasileira.

Benjamin Bagby has spent his career as a scholar and performer immersed in the Medieval culture of western and northern Europe. The result has been numerous programs, recordings, performances, and publications, many of them with Sequentia, the outstanding ensemble he founded with his late wife, Barbara Thornton, in 1977. In this collection, Fragments for the End of Time 9th-11th Centuries, singer and harpist Bagby and flutist and harpist Norbert Rodenkirchen sing and play an assortment of apocalyptic fragments from Frankish, Bavarian, Alsatian, Saxon, and Aquitainian sources.

It is not certain that all the music on this disc is by Scarlatti; the manuscript that contains the nine Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Saturday and four Lenten motets is unsigned and in places incomplete. Conductor Sergio Balestracci is confident of their authorship, however, on stylistic grounds and because Scarlatti is reported to have composed settings of these Passiontide meditations in ‘the solid style of Palestrina’ for the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1708.

This programme represents most of Pablo Ortiz’s recent choral writing, the multifaceted variety of which reflects the composer’s intense emotional connection with the past. Maizal del gregoriano uses a musical language that is reminiscent of Benedictine chant, while The Darkling Thrush absorbs Thomas Hardy’s melancholy depiction of the end of an era. Mozart is referenced in the operatic Teatro Martín Fierro Suite, as are the beauties of 16th-century madrigals in E ne la face de’ begli occhi accende. The final Metamorphoses is a remarkable superimposition of Medieval motets, expressing the essence of Ortiz’s belief in music as the ultimate time machine.

This resplendent CD introduces another outstanding 'early music' ensemble to Hyperion - Jeffrey Skidmore's Ex Cathedra, who will explore some of the lesser-known Baroque byways for us. They make their entrance with this programme of music by one of the four composers assigned to Louis XIV's Chapel in 1683. The disc gives us the opportunity to hear two of Lalande's 'grands motets' in full (substantial, sectional works in which episodes for vocal soloists are interspersed with passages for small ensembles and chorus, the orchestra providing both accompaniment and interludes), as well as a solo movement extracted from another one, and one of his instrumental pieces. This is music which was highly regarded both in the composer's own day and beyond, and performed throughout the eighteenth century.

"The wealth of compositions using the sensuous and highly charged texts of the Song of Songs is incredibly vast and rich. In the course of compiling this recording I re-discovered music that I have known for years, was introduced to pieces I didn’t know existed, and was privileged to commission a couple of works to add to this wonderful legacy of compositional material. Taken as a whole, the collection of pieces gathered here presents a varied and enlightening journey through the book of Song of Songs, and through the musical language of different centuries. I hope that both those that are well known and those that are new discoveries will encourage listeners to delve further into this miraculous repertoire." (Suzi Digby OBE)