Naxos
2007
Domenico Scarlatti: Sacred Vocal Music
About This Album
Several recent recordings have taken up Domenico Scarlatti's choral music, which is as conservative as his keyboard sonatas are radical. This is not just the result of the placement early in Scarlatti's career of the music heard here; the Te Deum, indeed, was written after Scarlatti arrived in Lisbon, and the other pieces are hard to date with any certainty. The Missa Breve "La stella" and Stabat Mater retain many features of the sacred music of the seventeenth century, with frequent exploitations of block contrasts and short sections that shift in tempo and meter. Much of the music is contrapuntal, and operatic influences are sparse. Consider the Stabat Mater, an unusual piece that deserves to be better known. It is a genuine 10-voice work -- the ensemble is possibly divisible, as annotator Keith Anderson claims, into two five-voice choirs, but really it's a flexible group of 10 that exploits a constantly changing set of texture contrasts. These works are gorgeous examples of polyphony in the old style, enriched by the developing harmonic language of the late Baroque. The Missa Breva "La Stella" achieves a strikingly distinctive response to the mass text with its combination of short sections and flexible language.
Track List

Te Deum, Motet For Double Chorus & Organ In C Major
1.
2.
Missa, For Chorus & Organ In A Minor ("La Stella")
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Cibavit Nos Dominus, Sacred Music For Chorus
15.
Missa, For Chorus & Organ In A Minor ("La Stella")
16.
Magnificat In D Minor, For Chorus
17.
18.
19.
20.
Stabat Mater, For Double Chorus & Continuo In C Minor
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.