Celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Joe Cuba Sextet’s debut album on Tico Records with this remastered reissue. This album set the stage for Joe as a premier Latin artist in late ’60s. The band reinvented the Latin sound several times over, giving salsa some swagger and swing. Starring Puerto Rican singers Jimmy Sabater and Cheo Feliciano, the album’s hits include “El Ratón,” “Niña” and “Flaco’s Cha Cha.”

Returning to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century German abbess and mystic, Anonymous 4 explores the theme of the Pentecostal power of the "Fiery Spirit". Hildegard's intensely emotional chants and visions (including the monumental hymn O ignee spiritus and some of her finest antiphons) are presented here framed by hymns and sequences that she and her convent sisters would have heard and sung every day.

"It has long been my desire to compile a single album of all the many elegies and songs of praise in which Maestro Adriaen Willaert is musically immortalized. In recent years, various musicological articles have been published that shed light on the music that pays tribute to Adriaen Willaert, composed in the period following his death on December 7, 1562. However, recordings and especially performances of most of these works have been lacking until now. All the more reason to fill this ‘vacuum’—which, for some works, spans over 400 years—with Dionysos Now!" (Tore Tom Denys)

This album features one of the most beautiful sacred compositions in the history of music. In this recording 2 great singers are protagonists: Mariella Devia and Francesca Provvisionato, accompanied Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana masterfully directed by Daniele Callegari. This is pure analogue recording. Giulio Cesare Ricci for this recording did not choose a church but the intriguing acoustics of the Lauro Rossi Theater in Macerata. He used only 2 sets of microphones, 2 Neumann M49 & 2 Neumann U47s. The mastering is by Ricci using the Signoricci system, entirely analogue & tube. The master was made by transferring the analogue master recorded with the Nagra 4s 15ips, 1/4 inch 2 tracks to DSD. No editing. All the tracks on this record are heard as they were performed.

Celebrated in his time as a 'man of great worth', who 'really knew how to play well and compose well', Annibale Padovano's modern-day neglect doesn't refect the high regard in which he was held. Cinquecento deliver fawless accounts of two major Mass settings as they might have been heard in Karl II's Habsburg court.

In addition to his symphonies, Anton Bruckner is best known for his sacred works: his stirring masses and his deeply moving a cappella motets. On this new BR-KLASSIK CD, to mark the Bruckner Year 2024, the Bavarian Radio Chorus and the Münchner Rundfunkorchester conducted by Peter Dijkstra present his Mass No. 2 together with five well-known motets and the two short Aequali for three trombones from 1847.

From the Early Middle Ages, Holy Week, one of the most solemn periods of the Christian year, has provided the context for extraordinary musical events. The singing of the passion story according to the evangelists has constituted one of the best-known of these special events. The chanting of passages from the Lamentations of Jeremiah on Maunt Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday as part of the monastic nocturnal service of Matins has constituted another.

This program focuses on the Missa pro defunctis by the composer Charles d'Argentil. Recorded for the first time here, it is one of only a dozen musical settings of the liturgy of the dead written before 1550 to have survived to this day. Little-known today, Charles d'Argentil, who worked in the prestigious Papal Chapel in Rome, was a key figure in the French Renaissance, as well as in the establishment of musical settings of the Requiem for papal ceremonies.

Biber was among the major composers for the violin in the history of the instrument. His own technique allowed him to easily reach the 6th and 7th positions, employ multiple stops in intricate polyphonic passages, and explore the various possibilities of scordatura tuning. Among other pieces, Biber wrote operas, sacred music and music for chamber ensemble. He also wrote one of the earliest known pieces for solo violin, the monumental passacaglia of the Mystery Sonatas. During Biber's lifetime, his music was known and imitated throughout Europe. In the late 18th century he was named the best violin composer of the 17th century by music historian Charles Burney. In the late 20th century Biber's music, especially the Mystery Sonatas, enjoyed a renaissance. Today, it is widely performed and recorded.

Guillaume Dufay was undoubtedly the greatest musician of the fifteenth century. The Missa Se la Face ay Pale is the first of the four Great Masses of his maturity. While ushering in the Renaissance period, this work represents a culmination in the music of the Middle Ages.

The Singapore Symphony and its music director Hans Graf present a recording of Józef Kozłowski’s Requiem, together with the Singapore Symphony Chorus & Youth Choir, as well as a quartet of outstanding soloists: Olga Peretyatko (soprano), Olesya Petrova (mezzo-soprano), Boris Stepanov (tenor) and Christoph Seidl (bass). The Requiem (1798) was commissioned to Kozłowski by the abdicated King Stanisław of Poland, and can be perceived as a requiem not just for the monarch, but for the entire Polish nation, absorbed by the Russian state during the 1780s.

The music of the Renaissance appears to reflect little of the dangers, horrors and violent conflicts of its time. Music written during the Hundred Years War or the French invasion of Italy gives hardly any impression to today’s ears of the precariousness of existence of which its composers, singers and listeners must have continually been aware. Nor do the two masses by Jacob Obrecht (1457/8 – 1505) on this recording betray anything of the restless spirit of the age, despite them both being based on models referring to suffering and misery.

This recording presents a selection of songs from Cantus sororum, and, in addition, one from Mass: the sequence Laetabundus exsultet fidelis, which was a popular sequence at Christmas in the Catholic Church generally during the middle ages.

In the middle of the 16th century, the Geneva Psalter infected the whole of Reformed Europe – Switzerland included – with a true psalm fever. The first complete collection of all 150 psalms, promoted by the Genevan reformer Jean Calvin, was published in 1562. The psalm verses were translated into French and provided with melodies by various Genevan cantors.

Most of Elisabetta Brusa’s compositions have been written for orchestral forces, with four volumes currently available on Naxos. The two new choral pieces in this fifth volume offer a revealing look at the composer’s response to spirituality and her own feelings about the end of life. The Stabat Mater was written as a trial for the Requiem and features vocal parts that are often pushed to the limit of their extensions for maximum expressivity. Following traditional models, Brusa’s Requiem evokes an archaic atmosphere which gives the piece a medieval aura, contrasted with moments of luminous and transcendent music.