The
London Oratory Schola Cantorum
has been around for several decades but came on the recording scene definitively only in the 2010s, offering a series of "Sacred Treasures of ..." albums. These are not the generic products one might guess from the title. Consider 2024's
Sacred Treasures of Venice
, which is not an anthology but an album focusing on a specific repertory and on one specific part of it at that. It made classical best-seller charts in early 2024. St. Mark's cathedral in Venice at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th is known for polychoral magnificence, for sacred music in which instruments played a new and groundbreaking role. Of course, more intimate music was also pursued, and even in larger pieces practice, was flexible, and they might have been sung a cappella. These pieces by
Giovanni Gabrieli
, his uncle
Andrea Gabrieli
, the young
Claudio Monteverdi
, and a couple of other composers are ideally suited to the all-male
, whose boy singers have some texture and heft. However, it is interesting as well to hear the St. Mark's repertory sung this way; one hears that the big dimensions of the music were not just a response to St. Mark's architecture but represented a musical evolution as well.
was innovative not just in using instruments but in shaping musical architectures with register and harmony, and this is apparent even where no instruments are present. The contrasts among the composers here are also intriguing; hear the limpid, almost Palestrinian pieces of
Giovanni Croce
at the end.
Hyperion
records this young choir well, not at the London Oratory School but at St. Augustine's Church, Kilbourn, London, which has a spacious enough acoustic to put this music across. These are indeed
, but this is also an album from which one can learn. ~ James Manheim