Output details

Alessandro Striggio - Mass in 40 parts

This Gramophone Award-winning CD (and 5.1 surround-sound DVD with documentary film) presents the world premiere recording of a missing link in Renaissance music, a Mass for an outsize 40 voices, until recently lost. The Mass is also the work that inspired Thomas Tallis’ 40-part 'Spem in alium', here given a revolutionary treatment with instruments, inspired by the huge instrumental collection of the work’s patron known to have been used in his choir’s performances.

Although both works have text in the sources, this does not imply that purely vocal forces were intended. Striggio’s work was performed in Munich where instrumental participation was very much preferred. To mirror that and to emphasize the strongly conversational nature of the music, I orchestrated each eight-part group with a distinct colour: viols / voices / brass / voices / reeds.

Hugh Keyte suggests the other 40-part work on the CD, 'Ecce beatam lucem', was intended for performance on a series of tiered cloud machines. Neither stereo nor surround-sound reproduction conveys height well: for our recording we laid the choirs L-R with the ‘top’ choir extreme right, its soprano & recorder timbre in pursuit of a similarly ethereal effect.

The CD also includes first recordings of many madrigals by this otherwise unrecorded composer, including music for _intermedii_, a highly important genre of music but one poorly represented on CD. For one of these pieces, ‘Fuggi, spene mia’, I wrote a highly ornamented solo part in contemporary style, following Vasari’s description of its performance from 1565. CD booklet and accompanying 13-minute DVD film give further detail.

In 2012-13 we had further opportunity to extend the project in eight performances (Belgium, Italy, Australia and an ACE-funded UK tour) which led to certain subtle changes in orchestration and layout. Research is now updated at <www.ifagiolini.com/striggio>.