The Catacombs

Quote:This recording brings together music composed in a variety of contrasting yet complemetary forms, from Gregorian chant to more elaborate, polyphonic music, set to words that explore the rawest human emotions, death, sin and repentance. The death of a loved one is a particularly distressing experience, and over the centuries composers have chanelled their grief into their most moving and emotional works. In the 1850s Brahms composed the German Requiem after he lost his mother, and Fauré’s Requiem was also composed after his mother died. Britten produced the imposingly bleak and Mahlerian Sinfonia da Requiem after the death of his parents. In this recording, the grief of Mary, the mother of Christ, is portrayed in Palestrina’s masterful setting of the Stabat Mater, composed for Pope Gregory XIV. Another moving portrayal of grief is Weelkes’s intimate depiction of the pain of David upon learning of his son Absalom’s death, When David heard.