Matthew Martin - Motets - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Aldo Parisot - Cello Celli [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/17/2006

Matthew Martin stands among Britain's leading composers for choir and organ. Performed by The Choir of Canterbury Cathedral under David Newsholme, with Jamie Rogers at the organ recently rebuilt by Harrison & Harrison, this programme reflects Martin's close association with Canterbury.The album spans the jubilant Psalm 150, first heard in Manchester, and the direct, concentrated writing of the Coventry Missa brevis, to the stillness of Ave verum and the dramatic narrative of When David heard. An Evensong sequence reveals Martin's instinct for liturgical form, while the organ work concludes the collection with clarity and purpose.Several pieces are recorded here for the first time, offering a focused survey of a distinctive contemporary voice.

Following it's digital debut on Linn presenting a triptych of works by Josquin des Prez, Vicente Lusitano and Roderick Williams, The Marian Consort now focuses it's attention on the central figure of this trio, the 'Portuguese'. In his own time an important music theorist, Lusitano's reputation and music have both been neglected in ours. As so often with musical figures of the Renaissance, many of the details of his life remain unknown. We can, however, be reasonably confident that he was the first published composer of African heritage. Referred to as 'pardo' in one eighteenth-century source, his only surviving printed book of compositions, the Liber primus epigramatum, was issued in Rome in 1551. True to it's pioneer spirit as 'brilliant discoverers, and exponents, of rare repertoire' (The Observer), The Marian Consort has recorded a carefully chosen program of these striking and impressive unjustly forgotten works.