The City Musick - Benevoli: Missa Benevola - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

March 4th 2018 marks the 90th birthday of one of the twenty-first century's most influential and prolific composers Samuel Adler. This three-disc boxed set provides a cohesive overview of his output and includes many premiere recordings. A pupil of both Paul Hindemith and Aaron Copland, Adler is a phenomenal symphonic writer (who, quite literally, wrote the book on orchestration) whose style merges twenty-first century ebullience with an almost classical economy and balance. The first two discs feature the Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt under conductor Emily Freeman Brown performing the First and Second Symphonies, a dance suite for orchestra, plus three concertos the Concerto for violin and orchestra, featuring Siwoo Kim, the award-winning violinist who originally premiered the work; the Concerto for woodwind quintet and orchestra; and the first Piano Concerto, featuring the prize-winning young pianist Michael Brown. The third disc features the highly talented young players from the Eastman School of Music alongside guitarist and fellow Eastman professor Nicholas Goluses. This is especially fitting since Adler taught at Eastman for nearly thirty years and these students represent the continuation of his prodigious legacy.

Two multi-choir Masses from mid-17th-century Rome (one for Easter, the other based on Palestrina's motet for Pentecost) complete I Fagiolini's dazzling series exploring the 'Colossal Baroque' and paying tribute to the 'lost' music of Orazio Benevoli.Maestro of the Cappella Giulia at St Peter's, Rome, Benevoli's mastery of surround-sound is clear in these very different works. The sheer quality of his music shines through and, sung by a group at the height of it's powers, changes our view of 17th-century multi-choir music.All the Masses in I Fagiolini's Benevoli series are premiere recordings.

I Fagiolini explore the dazzling multi-choir soundworld of Orazio Benevoli - a crucial figure in 17th-century Italian music. As maestro of the papal choir and providing four-choir masses for special occasions, Benevoli invigorated the multi-choir style with vocal lines full of cross-rhythms, and voluptuous tutti sections with unexpected dissonances. Despite it's beauty and historical importance, there have been few attempts to record Benevoli's music. His Missa Tu es Petrus - recorded here for the first time - was based on Palestrina's famous motet and perhaps written for the newly finished basilica of St Peter in Rome. It appears here alongside four delightful solo-voice motets by his contemporary Bonifazio Graziani, each of them premiere recordings