Paixao - Ett Oga PS Tiden - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Composers throughout the history of music have been inspired by Passiontide- a time of calm and expectation. The new album by the Zurich Chamber Singers is dedicated to this beautiful repertoire, combining Passiontide and funeral music of the English and German Renaissance and Baroque with the newly commissioned piece 'De profundis' by the American composer Kevin Hartnett. Henry Purcell composed 'Funeral Sentences' in 1694 as three burial anthems from earlier drafts. These were performed as part of the royal funeral of Queen Mary II in the same year. All three are settings of texts from the funeral rites of the Book of Common Prayer. Not enough information survives about Bach's 'Jesu, meine Freude' to know whether it was indeed a particular funeral for which this motet was written; yet it has many features of German funeral music of that time. It's eleven sections are organized by choral settings of the hymn InchJesu, meine FreudeInch over a sacred poem by Johann Cruger. Kevin Hartnett's piece 'De profundis' was written as a commission from the Zurich Chamber Singers and was first performed in 2016 in the chapel adjoining the Grossmunster church in Zurich. The text is taken from the seven penitential psalms, which are featured prominently in the liturgy of Holy Week.

In setting La Serva padrona to his own music, Paisiello showed he knew he was a composer to be reckoned with and he made the point again when he revised Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. In Paisiello's La Serva padrona, the protagonist is given a new aria InchDonne vaghe i studi nostriInch, (taken from Goldoni's Le Virtuose ridicole 1752), and two new duets, (authors unknown), are added, bringing the intermezzo closer in concept to opera buffa. The intermezzo for two voices was a defunct genre by this time but Paisiello decided to revive it indeed, the composer was clearly adapting to the new, lachrymose style popular with middle-class audiences which had arrived with La Buona figliuola by Goldoni-Piccinni (1760). The present edition differs from other recorded versions in that it is based on an unpublished critical edition for performance with period instruments, pitch at 415 Hz and no cuts to the recitatives or pezzo chiuso numbers.

Exaudi - Passion Texts [COMPACT DISCS] date 11/18/2014