Search - Musica Sacra, Andre Danican Philidor :: Musica Sacra - Sacred Music Through The Ages / Deller, et al

Boxed in a sturdy, handsomely produced lift-top container, this set of six perennial favorites from the Harmonia Mundi catalog is a beauty. It seeks to catch 10 centuries of sacred music, and it does that and much more. Each of the recordings is lauded, some of them intensely favored, by fans of early music. The Deller Consort's Gregorian Chant collection, for example, has been around for decades, delighting listeners with its austerity and methodical rhythms. It's a prize, as is the inestimable Marcel Peres and Ensemble Organum's 1986 recording of Josquin Desprez's Missa pange lingua (available separately as a single CD), by now an early-music evergreen. Peres touches the piece with his curious, rattling brilliance. For the collection of Bach's motets (available separately as a single CD), we get Rene Jacobs and the RIAS-Kammerchor, who tackle these pieces in a recording cut in 1995 with electrifying leaps on the notes. Among the six CDs in this box, none strikes with the thunder of William Christie's Charpentier Te Deum from 1989 (available separately as a single CD), a performance that can easily have even the most spiritually skeptical looking skyward for the deus ex machina that's powering the lit brass and bursting tenors. Then there's the 77-minute Beethoven Missa solemnis (available separately as a single CD), driven by Philippe Herreweghe (in 1995). This is an amazingly heartfelt performance, with waves of force that never stop. Little here packs the deliberate wallop, however, of Francis Poulenc's absurdly mesmerizing Stabat Mater, under the direction of Serge Baudo (available separately as a single CD), who takes this 1985 issue to heights that leave the listener breathless. When slow and in the lower registers, the piece stirs, and when booming with the fever of thinking of the divine, it oscillates the soul. --Andrew Bartlett