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 ...
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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...
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