Glossa’s album “Josquin the Undead. Laments, Deplorations and Dances of Death”, with our recording artists Graindelavoix directed by Björn Schmelzer, has been awarded a yearly “Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik”, in its 2022 edition. This is Germany’s most important independent award. Congratulations to our artists and (a bit) to ourselves. It’s a great honour to have been working with such a ground-breaking ensemble for more than 15 years now. [read more...]
Thirty years after the first recording by Les Arts Florissants and William Christie, Elena Sartori and her ensemble Allabastrina present now the second recording of the opera, performing the complete score as it was originally written by Rossi, without any cuts or additions of other composer’s music. Sartori uses exclusively Italian forces (17 solo singers and choristers), with the Baroque experts Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli (Orfeo) and Emanuela Galli (Euridice) in the main roles. [read more...]
Out on Glossa is the first-ever recording of one of the most important preserved dramatic works by one of the major figures of the European full Baroque, José de Nebra: Vendado es Amor, no es ciego, a 1744 summertime zarzuela success in Madrid. Alberto Miguélez Rouco conducts an animated vocal sextet and Los Elementos in a production prepared for and executed under the auspices of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. [read more...]
The surviving musical edition of Dutch Golden Age “Renaissance Man”, Constantijn Huygens receives a fresh new recording – issued on Glossa – from a singer who has become a connoisseur of vocal music from the seventeenth century: Cyril Auvity. The remarkable Huygens, alive for much of that century, was a poet, composer and musician whose “day job” was as a diplomat working for the Princes of Orange and who was an assiduous correspondent with leading thinkers such as Descartes, Rubens and Corneille. Huygens’ Pathodia sacra et profana encompasses a collection of songs in Italian, French and Latin whose simplicity belies the complexity of the emotions carried within them... [read more...]
There is something deeply troubling and inscrutable in Carlo Gesualdo’s music, something that any listener, even the most inexpert one, will unfailingly experience. This most particularly holds for Tenebrae Responsoria (1611), his definitive statement, his monument, his testament. Graindelavoix, that groundbreaking ensemble based in Antwerp and directed by Björn Schmelzer, are the ideal performers for this disquieting repertoire which originally was sung at Gesualdo’s castle and with probably only one listener in the audience: Gesualdo himself... [read more...]
In Jephté by Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, György Vashegyi directs – with style and energy – another riveting account of a neglected French Baroque opera. The work, based on the Biblical tale of a conquering general obliged, by a sacred vow, to sacrifice his own kin, became an immediate success in 1732, indeed a fixture in opera life in France, receiving over a hundred performances at the Opéra alone in the three decades following its première. [read more...]
With The Melancholic Bach, Emilio Moreno delves pensively and wistfully into the realms of the music that Bach might have written for the viola. This new Glossa album is in fact, by turns, a reflective but also an uplifting treat from beginning to end. Moreno, of course, is a violinist as well as a violist: with the former he has been directing his ensembles La Real Cámara and El Concierto Español, whilst with the latter instrument for many years he has been leading the violas of Orchestra of the 18th Century. [read more...]
Popular madrigals and chansons of the 16th century served as models for richly embellished “alla bastarda” versions on the viola da gamba. In this recording, the vocal originals are presented together with the extremely virtuoso instrumental versions which represent the first and hardly surpassed apex of solo literature for viola da gamba. [read more...]
In a new recording of music by Alessandro Scarlatti, Josetxu Obregón’s La Ritirata parades its dazzling vocal and instrumental talents in presenting the four cantatas which involve recorders and violins, together with an additional standalone soprano aria, for a further Glossa Neapolitan-flavoured release. [read more...]