On this Hyperion recording, the Westminster Cathedral Choir under James O'Donnell and the period instrument wind group His Majesty's Sagbutts & Cornetts present a winning realization of Lassus' Missa Bell' Amfitrit'altera as it might have been performed in Bavaria at the beginning of the seventeenth century.This particular Lassus mass has been recorded a few more times than most others have, and by good choirs. What sets the Westminster Cathedral Choir recording apart from the rest is the contextualization and liturgical ...
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On this Hyperion recording, the Westminster Cathedral Choir under James O'Donnell and the period instrument wind group His Majesty's Sagbutts & Cornetts present a winning realization of Lassus' Missa Bell' Amfitrit'altera as it might have been performed in Bavaria at the beginning of the seventeenth century.This particular Lassus mass has been recorded a few more times than most others have, and by good choirs. What sets the Westminster Cathedral Choir recording apart from the rest is the contextualization and liturgical placement of the work, fashioned after a pre-Vatican II service for the Feast Day of a martyr-saint. To fill in the holes, O'Donnell utilizes the wind band in canzoni of Hans Leo Hassler and organ music by Christian Erbach, and it is in the latter that we find paraphrases of the appropriate sequences. The recording, made in Westminster Cathedral, is both big and a tad bright, but it suits the music excellently well. Lassus' polychoral music is not so much antiphonal as merely chordal,...
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