Customer Reviews

Giovanni Gabrieli: Music For San Rocco

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Music for San Rocco" gives us a most generous collection of Gabrieli music(78 min.), beautifully performed and gorgeously recorded. The album as a whole is well paced, alternating the grand, the meditative and the purely instumental with intelligence and sensitivity. And the singing is always enthusiastic and downright rapturous!

For me, this is also McCreesh's best album because it is not a reconstruction. I have heard several of these discs, and the reconstructions of Mass or vesper services might be interesting to listen to once, or maybe even twice if you have never been ot a genuine Catholic service of this sort. But frankly, liturgies, and liturgical chants are not entertainment, and generally are purely functional rather than entertaining. If you want just the real music on these discs, you have to program out 20-25% of the selections! More music and less turgid liturgical history for me, Paul!

I'm not much of an early music buff, but being acquainted with one of the soloists on the disc, I decided to spring for it. Am I glad I did! This is one absolutely stunning album. The incomparable David Hurley himself makes this disc a must for your collection.

There is little I can add to what the other reviewers have said about this tremendous recording. The performances are very good, the tempi are well chosen and the instruments are the rights ones.

There are many excellent contributions from individuals - Robin Blaze is positively heroic in Buccinate in neomenia tuba. The three violins in Sonata XXI con tre violini play this music with great sensuality. The cornettists are all first rate and so are the sackbut players.

It all sounds very good and the music is wonderful.

Let's just hope that the video of this recording is issued on DVD soon! (Let DGG know you wan them to do this!)

I am huge fan of music from this time period and I have listened to countless composers that are able to create and compose stupendous and astounding music. Gabrieli is one those geniuses. Music for San Rocco is a splendid piece and I agree with Thomas Coryat whom wrote an amazing review at the time of when the piece was performed. Being a deeply devout Lutheran I love the lyrics and I love the message of the San Rocco celebrations. Listening to it reminds one of being in Sunday mass and I love this since Sunday is my favorite day of the week. The book-let is well done with a short piece that scans the history of this splendid work and has the lyrics in several languages. I am huge fan of renaisance art and the cover art is absolutely gorgeous. I can not say enough good things or give it enough accolades. This is simply put it sublime.

Being only marginally acquainted with the music of Gabrieli and his period, I have little to add to comments already made. I must confess that two discs worth of 16th century liturgical music runs a little long for me. I'll focus instead on the sound of the SACD version.

This was one of my first SACD purchases, and I chose it because I knew that Gabrieli wrote for multiple choirs situated in different sections of the church, and figured that, if the engineers did their jobs right, this could be a stunning demonstration disc.

It is.

Gabrieli's music is a natural of mutichannel reproduction. In Timothy Roberts' opening organ toccata, the sense of space in this recording is uncanny. "In ecclesiis" envelops the listener with front and back chorus and soloists whose voices soar with a fullness that we can usually only experience in a real basilica. The only thing missing is the upper reverberation that you get in a real church. If your rear speakers are elevated like mine are (I had to work within the limitations of my room--doors and such!), you may get some of that sense.

If you are at all interested in the music of Gabrieli, this is the recording to get. If you are set up for multichannel sound with an SACD player, be sure to get it in that format. To hear it with the separation and sonic detail of San Rocco, brings this very old music alive. The music was reportedly composed for the larger Saint Mark's Cathedral, but for recording purposes San Rocco was deemed preferable. The church itself is a beautiful instrument and is hard to capture faithfully in just two channels.

In contrast with the previous reviewer, I find this group to be at their absolute best when presenting a reconstructed service. When a selection of "pure music" such as this CD is presented, I find myself getting bored with the evenness of sound.

The acoustic of the Scuola di San Rocco is much drier than that of a church - wooden flooring and all - and I find that the very large scale pieces (such as the closing Magnificat) lose much of their magnificence performed in this acoustic. I don't mean to say that it is not magnificent, only that it could be so much more so. The smaller, chamber-style pieces on the other hand sound superb here.

All the performances are flawless and very sensitive, no matter what scale they are on. This is very much in the same league as the tremendous Venetian Coronaton CD by the same group, but because of the acoustic - or maybe the sound engineering itself - I am left feeling less viscerally involved by the close of the CD than in I should be - hence 4/5.

This CDs sound quality is superb and highlights the antiphonal quality of the works.

This CD displays the range of Gabrieli, who is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated composers. There are pieces for every mood. From the triumphal "Jubilate Deo," to the dynamic "Magnificat," this collection does not disappoint. My favorite track has to be "Suscipe, Clementissime Deus." It starts off as very prayerful, introspective and pleading and blossoms into an outpouring of fervor toward the end when the singers exclaim, "Tu solus sanctus, tu solus Dominus, to solus altissimus, Jesu Christe."

This recording was made only a year before La Fenice's "Giovanni Gabrieli: In Festo Sanctissimae Trinitatis". Thus for one year it was probably the best CD of Gabrieli on the market. It's still an attractive performance, with some tracks that are luscious and a few that are lumpy. I'll try to explain why I prefer the sounds of La Fenice.

Like "In Festo S. Trinitatis", this performance is a composite of Gabrieli sonatas, toccatas, and Latin-texted motets, arranged as they might have been heard in the church of San Rocco in Venice, on the saint's feast day. This is surely the right concept for performing Gabrieli for modern listeners, combining solemn majesty with instrumental fireworks. Soloists Robert Harre-Jones, Robin Blaze, Donald Grieg, Charles Pott and others, familiar to Early Music fans, all live up to their reputations here, as do the cornettos and violins of Paul McCreesh's Gabrieli Players. But there lies the problem; this isn't particularly music for soloists. If anything, Paul McCreesh conducts these polychoral structures with too much attention to the "top lines" and high voices/instruments. The middle voices are heard as "supporting" and therefore not expressively independent. The whole "sound" is grand and resonant, but it's too symphonic. The balance is soprano-heavy, the tenor is flaccid in the more complex pieces, and the bass is stolid.

I'm making the recording sound less magnificent than it is. The CD by Jean Tubery and La Fenice is interpretatively better but this one is richly sonorous and highly enjoyable. To be second best in such a musical league is still awfully good.

MC'CREESH'S GABRIELI EXUDES POWER AND EXUBERANCE, IN SHORT, THE 'GLORY THAT WAS VENICE'!

Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort and Players have become famous for their recreations of the great liturgical set pieces of the Venetian sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. and he is quite successful at capturing the essence of Giovanni Gabrieli's(1556-1612)music.

This recording takes us back to the Confraternity of San Rocco, for which Gabrieli and his colleague the virtuoso falsetto, Bartolomeo Barbarino, composed an amazing collection of instrumental and vocal music. In fact, Barbarino may have performed at the Feast of Music held in honor of St. Roch in 1608.

This program explores a wide range of works by Gabrieli from the more intimate motets with organ accompaniment down to the extraordinary 33-part Magnificat. The sheer magnificence of the sound of massed cornetts and sackbuts, blending harmoniously with the voices, is as irresistible to the present-day listener and it was centuries ago.

This groups of performers, though having explored a wide range of repertory, clearly retain a strong affinity for Gabrieli's music. (I have enjoyed for many years "Venetian Chirstmas" and "A Venetian Coronation".) The singing and playing of the Gabrieli Consort and Players is superb and flamboyant. Mention must be made of Barbarino's two motets sung skillfully by countertenor, David Hurley, who renders them with strength and beauty. The cornetts and sackbutts add greatly to the success and grandeur of this disc.

GRAMOPHONE(January, 1997): "It is hard to imagine this fine recording of Gabrieli's music being superseded for some time to come. For the sheer splendour of the music, and the excellence of the performance, this recording is a must, a real five-star achievment."