Early in December 1787 Catherine II of Russia invited the famous composer to her court at St Petersburg where Italian opera was all the rage. A few days after his arrival the wife of the ambassador of Naples and Sicily died and Cimarosa was asked by him to compose a Requiem Mass for the funeral. Composers did not need to bother about being original in those days and Cimarosa could draw easily on a common stock of melodic ideas, but, nevertheless, his Mass is well shaped and certainly not a mere puce d'occasion.

With this pairing, Christoph Spering continues his exploration of some of the byways of the choral and vocal repertoire. Schumann’s choral music is desperately neglected, even by the standards of a composer who is still often misunderstood. That said, the two works recorded here don’t perhaps on paper present his best side. Richard Wigmore has described Der Rose Pilgerfahrt (‘The Pilgrimage of the Rose’) as ‘German Romanticism at its most sickly sweet’ (3/11) and it is clear how the tale of a rose becoming human to experience love might appeal more to 19th-century sensibilities than to our own.

Sebastian Knüpfer is yet another Baroque composer whose reputation and popularity have been overshadowed by J S Bach. Little of Knüpfer's music has previously been transcribed from its many manuscripts, let alone published. However, in his day Knüpfer was a respected and highly sought-after composer; his compositions were admired by his contemporaries and, according to his obituary, he 'composed quotations of the Psalms and other Biblical books with such sweetness and skilfulness that he delighted even the saddest hearts, and his name is spoken with admiration not only in Leipzig but also outside'.

Alessandro Scarlatti is justly famed for his contributions to Read more opera seria and cantata, and indeed it may even be said that he was one of the main progenitors of the Neapolitan style of the early 18th century. In Naples and earlier in Rome he was obligated to write a considerable amount of sacred music, much of it for smaller settings that would be useful in the local churches. Since his music is now becoming more common on disc, it is good to have this recording of a set of four pieces—a gradual, a Marian antiphon, a motet, and a Psalm—all of which reflect rather different approaches to each portion of the liturgy and yet contain a certain commonality in form and structure.

Here is the work of a genius who died at the age of twenty-six: Pergolesi's Stabat Mater is one of the miracles of eighteenth-century sacred music. Nourished by their experience of ‘setting in resonance’ early and contemporary repertories, Riccardo Minasi and the Hamburg musicians shed an astonishingly modern light on these moving pieces, in which the voices of Giulia Semenzato and Lucile Richardot intertwine in the most sublime of communions. The Stabat is echoed by Joan Rossell’s poignant Salve Regina, long attributed to Pergolesi himself.

Johann Kuhnau was one of life’s polymaths—as well as being a composer he trained as a lawyer, spoke several languages, helped found Leipzig’s opera house, theorized about music and even found time to write a novel sending up the shortcomings of the contemporary music scene. Musically he’s the link between Schütz and Bach, but he was alive to many different stylistic traits as this selection of sacred music demonstrates. From the brilliantly brassy opening of Ihr Himmel jubilirt to the restrained intensity of Tristis est anima mea, it’s music invigorated at every turn by The King’s Consort.

Cappella Amsterdam and its artistic leader Daniel Reuss make their PENTATONE debut with In Umbra Mortis. The album brings together Wolfgang Rihm’s contemporary Sieben Passions-Stücke and Passion-related motets by the Flemish 16th-century polyphonist Giaches de Wert, revealing unexpected kinship between two composers four centuries apart. By entwining the old and new, the listener is invited on a chromatic journey of astonishing beauty. Since its foundation in 1970, Cappella Amsterdam has shown an exceptional mastery of contemporary and early vocal music, with acclaimed excurses to Romantic repertoire as well. Daniel Reuss has been Artistic Leader of Cappella Amsterdam for over three decades now, and has worked with several renowned choirs and ensembles.

Reger wrote the Latin Requiem in 1914 in remembrance of soldiers fallen in the 1st World War - but after completing approx 30 minutes of music, was talked out of completing it by a well meaning but entirely misguided musical associate. What remains is a massive, dense, hugely impressive torso of highly chromatic, late Romantic choral/soloists/orchestral music of the first order. Highly recommended.

Naples was famous throughout Europe in the 17th century for the variety of musical performances that took place during the course of the church year. Christmas was one of the feasts that was celebrated with particular splendour. On the present CD, the Ensemble Odyssee under the direction of Andrea Friggi introduces Nocturnes and Pastorals composed by Gaetano Veneziano (1656-1716) for the liturgy of Christmas services.

Throughout his life, Felix Mendelssohn harboured a strong love-hate relationship with the Berlin Sing-Akademie, where, as a singer and student of the director Carl Friedrich Zelter, he got to know important works of Italian vocal polyphony of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The appetite for evolving performance practices in Bach’s St Matthew Passion appears undiminished as we have gradually shifted, over the generations, from larger to smaller ensembles and also towards a greater dramatic understanding of the implications of Bach’s ambitious ‘stereophonic’ double choir and orchestra choreography. René Jacobs has never been shy of a new hunch and taking it as far as (and sometimes beyond) what is either reasonable or defining.

The Trio Peltomaa Fraanje Perkola combines the sounds of the human voice, piano and viola da gamba with electronic effects and medieval harp. The players have diverse backgrounds in early music, jazz, Finnish folk music and contemporary music, although it was medieval music that was the inspiration for their highly personal and recognisable sound. The group continues to explore the chants of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Pérotin (1160-1230) and 14th-century pilgrimage songs.

17th Century Wrocław (then Breslau) was one of Europe’s important musical centres. Its three main Protestant churches – St. Elisabeth, St. Mary Magdalene and St. Bernardine – collected extensive music libraries. Their repertoire was shaped both by prints imported from Italy and Germany, and by works composed by local cantors and organists employed in church ensembles. A separate collection of nearly 400 prints from 1610–55 remained in private hands. During World War II, however, they were taken away from the city and dispersed after 1945. Some items have not been found until now. The majority of the prints returned to Wrocław. Numerous manusripts were considered lost until the late 1980s, when they reappeared in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. They found their way there from Moscow, where some items of the former Breslau library still remain.

This Requiem is known in five sources; two of them mention no composer, two attribute it to Antoine de Févin, one, the Occo Codex, to Antoine Divitis. It is recorded here in the version transmitted by an early sixteenth-century manuscript, the Occo Codex, a sumptuous, richly illuminated volume. The book was originally intended for use in worship at one of the oldest churches in Amsterdam, built in the fourteenth century on the site of a miracle which played a fundamental role in constituting the religious identity of Amsterdam. Occo was the name of the rich merchant who financed the production of the manuscript.

From an early age Benedetto Marcello proved to be a man of great versatility: a poet, writer, musician, lawyer, judge, administrator and philologist, holding important posts in these functions during his entire life. As a composer he wrote a substantial oeuvre, covering all important fields of composition: sacred and secular choral works, opera and a large body of instrumental music.