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Featured Album July 2025: Monteverdi Choir "Bruckner & Gesualdo: Motets"
We love seeing the range of world-class music taking place at Snape Maltings where The Early Music Shop is proud to have one of our two showrooms. At the end of this month, the Monteverdi Choir will make a much-anticipated visit as part of the 'Summer at Snape' series, so we thought it would be fitting to choose their latest release as this month's Featured Album. Recorded live last year, the disc marks a new era for the choir with a programme of Bruckner and Gesualdo's motets. Discover more by reading on...
Bruckner & Gesualdo: Motets
Monteverdi Choir
Jonathan Sells
OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR JULY 2025
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From the artist's press release:
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Why The Early Music Shop loves "Bruckner & Gesualdo: Motets":
This is the first release from the Monteverdi Choir since the pandemic; it’s also the first since the fall from grace of the choir’s founding director John Eliot Gardiner with whom the Monteverdi’s have been associated for 60 years. Under Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir were under his exclusive control and appeared with no one else. But since he and the choir parted company last year, the Monteverdi Choir have appointed former member Jonathan Sells as their Choir Director and have appeared with several distinguished period specialists, including Masaaki Suzuki. Made live in concert at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, at the end of a short tour of this Bruckner–Gesualdo programme, this new CD celebrates Bruckner’s 200th anniversary year and the Monteverdi’s own diamond jubilee. On the strength of what Sells draws out of the singers, it’s clear they are in very good hands and the future looks rosy.
Programming sacred music by the pious nineteenth-century Bruckner, composer of these exquisite motet miniatures as well as cathedral-like symphonies, and the aristocratic Renaissance Gesualdo, known for is murderous jealousy and audacious harmonic writing, does not seem an obvious choice. Yet it works, and does so supremely well. The six Bruckner motets are sung with passion, a generously warm tone and impeccable shaping from Sells and his forces. There may be some who are less convinced by the use of such a relatively large choir in the Gesualdo motets, where they might be thought to have lost some of their harmonic quirkiness and intimacy. But if we adopt Sells’s view that the programme, which also includes Lotti’s celebrated Crucifixus a 8 and Palestrina’s Stabat Mater arranged by no less a figure than Richard Wagner in 1848, is an imaginary nineteenth-century ‘historical’ concert, then the approach to Palestrina, Lotti and Gesualdo is understandable.
Beautifully presented in SDG’s usual manner and with an engaging liner note from Sells as well as full sung texts and translations, this CD continues the high standards of all previous releases on this own-brand label.
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Bruckner & Gesualdo: Motets is available from The Early Music Shop online – or from our Snape Maltings showroom.