Customer Reviews

Music From The Venetian Ospedali

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This is an amazing CD. The singing is so beautifully textured and I found this CD a perfect joy to listen to. The San Francisco Girls Chorus is truly amazing and I look forward to thier next CD. You must own this album!

this is such an incredible, powerful cd! the voices are beautiful and the blend is exquisite! definitely recommended!

The San Francisco Girls Chorus presents a concert as it very well might have sounded in 18th century Venice. Firstly, only young women sing as was the case in the Venetian Ospedali and, secondly, the low parts are transposed up or sung by girls with low voices. Overall, I must say that it seems that a lot of the low parts are transposed so the overall effect is one of choral works for high voices, although the bass instruments have a fill-in effect. The Frenchman de Brosses told that the girls of the ospedali sang like angels, and this recording evokes that impression given the youthful, but strong, voices of the girls of the San Francisco Girls Chorus.
The Vivaldi is well-known, but the compositions by Porta, Porpora and Brusa are not and they are really high quality compositions that are not simply of academic interest, but also appeal to the senses on a visceral level.
The instrumental ensemble includes some of the best Californian performers of early music. They play on historical instruments. This recording is very serious and will appeal not only to a general audience, but also to the discriminating tastes of early music fans.

The San Francisco Girls' Chorus and the SF Boys' Chorus are combining to sing, by invitation, at the inauguration of Barack Husein Obama as President of the United States on January 20th, 2009. I hope that all the TV networks, especially Fox, will broadcast their image to the whole country. Not only do they sing well, on a par with the comparable youth choruses of Europe, but they represent the healthy, joyful, tolerant spirit of their City of the Golden Gate, and thus the real democratic values of America. Their alert, focused, committed faces come in all shades of complexion; they include children whose great-great-great grandparents crossed America in covered wagons and also children who arrived in America with their immigrant parents from China, Ukraine, Latin America, the Middle East. None of them are losers, druggies, gangsters, couch potatoes. They are the children of the families that I know to be the core of San Francisco, of all economic classes but devoted to make a good life without destroying the planet. They are the hopeful Americans, not the fraudulent scare-babies from the bogeyman-city as portrayed by Bill O'Reilly and other panderers to right-wing fanaticism. Take a close look, America! Do your kids look any more clean-cut, serious, big-hearted than these?

This is a prize-winning CD, by the way, a performance of subtle and difficult music from the Italian Baroque, music associated with the Venetian homes for orphans of the 17th and early 18th Centuries. The girls sing it with both verve and delicacy.