Hyperion's Music from the Court of Maximilian II is the recording debut of Vienna-based Renaissance singing group Cinquecento, whose six members are natives of five different European countries. Cinquecento made quite a splash on its first European concert tour in 2005 and is serving a residency at the cathedral of St. Rochus and Sebastian in Vienna, singing a new polyphonic mass setting every week. The group is certainly in good voice on this disc, recorded in the Dominikanerkirche in Retz in 2006, a friendly acoustic for ...
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Hyperion's Music from the Court of Maximilian II is the recording debut of Vienna-based Renaissance singing group Cinquecento, whose six members are natives of five different European countries. Cinquecento made quite a splash on its first European concert tour in 2005 and is serving a residency at the cathedral of St. Rochus and Sebastian in Vienna, singing a new polyphonic mass setting every week. The group is certainly in good voice on this disc, recorded in the Dominikanerkirche in Retz in 2006, a friendly acoustic for an international group of musicians that blends as though no borders separate them so long as they raise their voices in song. The program might be effectively, if clumsily, subtitled "Franco-Flemish composers in the service of the Habsburg Empire," specifically Maximilian II of Austria, whose family chapel employed the musicians represented here in the 1540s and 1550s. The center of attention is short-lived composer Jacobus Vaet, whose high-minded style and effective text painting...
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