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Recording

Lully: Dies irae, Te Deum

Allabastrina Choir and Consort, Elena Sartori
59:35
Brilliant Classics 95592

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hese performances of two great masterpieces by Jean Baptiste Lully are extremely beautiful in every respect. Concise and beautifully balanced instrumental playing is matched by choral and solo singing of a very high order. The ensembles have clearly digested completely the idiosyncratic style of this music, and their effortless and utterly convincing ornamentation, their smooth alternation between solo and tutti sections and their consistently beautiful tone and blend are simply exemplary. I was not as familiar with the Dies irae  as I am with the Te Deum, but this recording has won me over to the considerable virtues of a fine and powerful funeral composition. Elena Sartori is professor of choral singing at the Claudio Monteverdi Conservatoire in Bolzano, and her expertise both with the scores and with her choral forces is apparent. I am perhaps duty bound to mention a couple of omissions in this package – neither texts nor translations are provided, although of course both are easily accessed online, but curiously the accomplished soloists are also not identified. Perhaps this is a consequence of the Allabastrina ethos in which the group is regarded as ‘an alchemical combination of friendship, vocal and instrumental entente’. Often such mission statements come across as pretentious, but in this case the proof of the pudding is in the listening.

D. James Ross

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