Some people might not have picked the Sixteen, a British choir known for its clean, well-modulated versions of Baroque and Renaissance choral works, often a cappella, as the ideal interpreters of Monteverdi's sprawling, problematical, groundbreaking, and instrumentally accompanied Vespro della beata vergine, better known as the Vespers of 1610. Indeed, this album was released in late 2014, in tandem with a tour visiting various English cathedrals and concert halls, and the tour was the first the group had made with an ...
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Some people might not have picked the Sixteen, a British choir known for its clean, well-modulated versions of Baroque and Renaissance choral works, often a cappella, as the ideal interpreters of Monteverdi's sprawling, problematical, groundbreaking, and instrumentally accompanied Vespro della beata vergine, better known as the Vespers of 1610. Indeed, this album was released in late 2014, in tandem with a tour visiting various English cathedrals and concert halls, and the tour was the first the group had made with an accompanying instrumental group. The Sixteen is swollen here to between 20 and 22, probably a reasonable size for the scope of the work, a collection of liturgical texts probably connected with a major Marian feast day. The work was composed in Mantua but seems to have had the big, intricate spaces of St. Mark's in Venice as an intended destination, perhaps because the composer was already angling for a post there. Much of its instrumental accompaniment is unspecified, and it may have...
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