Victoria: O vos omnes

Easter 2009 sees the release of a major new disc on Collegium from John Rutter, the Cambridge Singers and La Nuova Musica, featuring a collection of outstanding motets from the canon of European sacred choral repertoire.

Focusing on the extraordinary body of choral music produced for liturgical use during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, The Sacred Flame explores the rich and varied ways in which European composers responded to sacred texts. Delving into a treasure-trove of music from cultural centres as diverse as Amsterdam, Antwerp, Leipzig, Milan, Rome, and Venice, this collection features familiar classics by Gabrieli,Monteverdi, Palestrina and Schütz, as well as less widely-known masterpieces by Bach, Buxtehude, Hassler and Sweelinck. All are performed in stunning new recordings by the Cambridge Singers at their sensuous and virtuosic best, joined here for the first time on disc by the instrumentalists of La Nuova Musica, rapidly establishing areputation as one of the UK’s most exciting early music ensembles.

All repertoire featured on The Sacred Flame is drawn from the enormously popular European Sacred Music collection edited by John Rutter for the Oxford University Press Oxford Choral Classics series. Recorded in the unparalleled acoustic of the Great Hall at University College School in London, and produced and engineered by award winning producer Simon Eadon, the performances of these much loved works heard on this disc are set to become definitive.

“These singers of John Rutter's choir are so expert, so very good at everything they do… They shade and shape the phrases beautifully” Gramophone

Exquisite music from a turning point in history.

This recording brings together music composed in a variety of contrasting yet complemetary forms, from Gregorian chant to more elaborate, polyphonic music, set to words that explore the rawest human emotions, death, sin and repentance. The death of a loved one is a particularly distressing experience, and over the centuries composers have chanelled their grief into their most moving and emotional works. In the 1850s Brahms composed the German Requiem after he lost his mother, and Fauré’s Requiem was also composed after his mother died. Britten produced the imposingly bleak and Mahlerian Sinfonia da Requiem after the death of his parents.

In this recording, the grief of Mary, the mother of Christ, is portrayed in Palestrina’s masterful setting of the Stabat Mater, composed for Pope Gregory XIV. Another moving portrayal of grief is Weelkes’s intimate depiction of the pain of David upon learning of his son Absalom’s death, When David heard. Allegri’s Miserere concerns the belief in a higher power and the submission to it. Set to Psalm 51, the work was recognised by its composer and the Vatican as being of such beauty that its publishing was forbidden. No score was to leave the Papal Chapel. The child Mozart was famously shown the score, and he copied it from memory in the 1770s and in effect released this remarkable work to the wider world.