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Reviewer:
Richard Lawrence The Mass is laid out on an expansive scale, scored for double choir and soloists, two violins and violoncino, and other instruments ad lib. On this recording it is punctuated by two motets, for two and three voices respectively, and some anonymous – improvised? – doodling on the organ. I don’t know why it should include Lauda Jerusalem, one of the psalms for Vespers, but it makes for a suitably joyful conclusion. There is much antiphonal writing, as you would expect, and much in the way of sonorous but empty grandeur. Passages like the surprising chromatic cadence at ‘miserere nobis’ in the Gloria are all too rare. Here and there are reminders that Cavalli was above all a composer of opera. And there’s the rub. The report from the French ambassador to Mazarin (quoted in the poorly translated booklet note) refers to the choir’s inclusion of famous musicians who had come to sing in the operas during the Carnival. Some operatic extravagance would be welcome here, the male alto soloists being particularly reticent. Moreover, with a choir of only eight voices balancing the eight soloists, the element of contrast is pretty well absent. The cornetts and trombones sound splendid, though, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Of those parts, the motet O bone Jesu for unnamed soprano and alto is particularly well worth hearing. |
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