Richafort: Requiem
Tributes to Josquin Desprez
The King's Singers
Under the informed scholarly guidance of David Skinner, this performance is characterised by the King's Singers celebrated clarity of sound, immaculate intonation and ensemble. With just six...
Richafort: Requiem
Tributes to Josquin Desprez
The King's Singers
Purchase product
Under the informed scholarly guidance of David Skinner, this performance is characterised by the King's Singers celebrated clarity of sound, immaculate intonation and ensemble. With just six...
About
Few composers of any age have enjoyed the widespread admiration and unanimous praise of successive generations as Josquin Desprez. He is considered the greatest creator and innovator of musical composition during the Renaissance, and for some half a millennium his music has stood the test of time. He is remembered as much for his own works as for his lasting influence on those of his contemporaries and students, demonstrated in many of the compositions in tribute of 'the Master' featured in this programme. The programme's centrepiece is Jean Richafort's Requiem Mass, Missa pro defunctis, a tribute that employs several of Josquin's compositional devices.
The King's Singers once again demonstrate their versatility and trademark precision in this new programme devised by leading early-music scholar and conductor David Skinner.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
August 2013
Under the informed scholarly guidance of David Skinner, this performance is characterised by the King's Singers celebrated clarity of sound, immaculate intonation and ensemble. With just six male voices, one to a part, they create a glorious resonance
July 2013
It is heartening that the King's Singers shouls devote themselves to a work as comparatively obscure as Jean Richafort's Requiem. Equally heartening is it that this presumed memorial to Josquin should now boast three recordings of a very high standard.
1st July 2013
The King’s Singers’ reserved expression and sense of tender intimacy is clear from the outset...In terms of actual interpretation and performance The King’s Singers are uncontroversial...but there is nothing mannered or artificial about the performance.
18th April 2013
some of the shorter pieces grouped around it by composers who are very little known today contain the most striking music here, especially Hieronymus Vinders' seven-part O Mors Inevitabilis and Jacquet of Mantua's densely polyphonic Dum Vastos Adriae Fluctus. All the Kings' Singers' performances are admirably manicured – perhaps just a little too much so at times
6th April 2013
An unexplored, if slightly morbid Renaissance treasure trove, this CD presents memorials composed by Josquin’s colleagues after the Flemish master’s death...the most astonishing work is Jacquet de Mantua’s Dum vastos, weaving together five Josquin “hits”.
Daily Mail 16th August 2013
This must be one of the most beautiful albums The King’s Singers have given us in their 45-year career
Early Music Today Autumn 2013
The tranquil, refined, passionate-when-required singing of The King’s Singers is exemplary, beautifully balanced and phrased with none of the regrettable ‘off the voice’ gestures to which they occasionally resort in early music, and the recording places it all in perspective
