“ Michelangelo, when asked how best to please a Spanish patron, replied ‘show much blood and nails’. These Lamentations capture this rawness with Victoria’s own unique expressivity. If you have been moved by the Victoria Requiem then these Lamentations are for you.” Peter PhillipsGimell Records celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2010. Set up by Peter Phillips and Steve Smith in 1980 solely to record The Tallis Scholars, the Gimell label has gone on to win many awards throughout the world including three Diapson d’Or Awards and four Gramophone Awards, one of which was the Gramophone Record of the Year Award in 1987. They were the first independent label to receive this prestigious award and it is still the only recording of Early Music to do this. Their recording of Josquin's Missa Malheur me bat has also been nominated for a Grammy Award in 2010 in the Best Small Ensemble Performance category.Gimell’s 30th anniversary celebrations will include a number of special CD releases starting with a new recording of the Victoria Lamentations coupled with the Padilla Lamentations. This CD, released in the UK on Monday March 29th 2010 in advance of the Easter season is the 50th recording to be released on Gimell (excluding compilations). All 50 recordings have been produced by Steve Smith and Peter Phillips. Further 30th anniversary recordings will be released later in the year including three 4CD set compilations of “The Best of the Tallis Scholars”, one for each decade, available at budget price. The Tallis Scholars will also perform a 30th anniversary concert (details to be announced later in 2010).On the 30th anniversary, Peter Phillips said: “The creation of Gimell has meant that for 30 years I have been able to record whatever music I wanted. Every one of our fifty releases has been planned, recorded and edited by me and Steve Smith, my loyal producer and co-founder of Gimell Records. This has been a unique privilege for a concert artist - never being asked to cut corners. I am immensely grateful to my singers, our concert agents, and our CD distributors but especially to those hundreds of thousands of supporters worldwide who own a Gimell recording.” The first Gimell recording of the much-loved Allegri Miserere was made on March 22nd and 23rd, 1980, in the Chapel of Merton College, Oxford, renowned for its outstanding acoustics. Some of Gimell’s best-loved recordings have been made in this Chapel, including their acclaimed CD of Tallis's monumental 40-part motet Spem in alium. This new recording was also made in Merton College, where Peter Phillips has also recently been appointed Director of Music for a new Choral Foundation. Victoria’s nine Lamentations contain some of his most intense, mystical and unique music and rank alongside the Requiem as one of his greatest achievements. To quote Peter Phillips:“Michelangelo, when asked how best to please a Spanish patron, replied ‘show much blood and nails’. These Lamentations capture this rawness with Victoria’s own unique expressivity. If you have been moved by the Victoria Requiem then these Lamentations are for you.” As Peter Phillips writes in his sleeve notes, the style of Victoria’s writing for Holy Week is particularly telling, almost defying analysis. “It is this intensity, in the end, which makes him so distinctive, not only in the wider European context but also amongst his compatriots… Of all the great High Renaissance composers, Victoria’s writing can have the most immediately identifiable atmosphere…And the melodies that come from it are elemental, wrapped round the words, striding up and down with incredible purpose. There is not a note wasted …Victoria had achieved his own match of function and expressivity.”Gimell’s 30th anniversary CD also contains Spanish composer Padilla’s six-voice setting of the Lamentations, an impassioned setting of the text and one of his finest achievements.Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars have specialised in the performance of Renaissance polyphony since 1973. They have built a reputation for bringing some of the greatest European church music of the 15th and 16th centuries onto the concert platform and into the recording studio. Through their Award-winning recordings and in over 1,600 concerts they have done more than any other group to establish the sacred vocal music of the Renaissance as one of the great repertoires of Western classical music. They are without doubt the leading exponents of Renaissance sacred music and their exploration of the depth and variety of this repertoire has reached a world-wide audience. It is no co-incidence that they were recently awarded the “fourth most influential early music ensemble” by the publication Early Music Today in November 2009.This 30th anniversary CD adds yet another important recording to their already impressive catalogue and is definitely one for both fans of The Tallis Scholars and those new to their music.
- Wykonawca The Tallis Scholars
- Data premiery 2010-01-01
- Nośnik CD
