Durante: Neapolitan Music for Christmas Vol. 1

Kölner Akademie, Willens, Michael Alexander

CPO 777 571-2

Little documentation exists for the stations in Francesco Durante's life, but our sources do tell us that he was one of the great Neapolitan church composers during the first half of the eighteenth century as well as one of the most influential and most highly respected teachers in Naples. Even today he may be named at the head of the list of the representatives of the Neapolitan school. Ever since the late seventeenth century Christmas music, especially in the form of cantatas and motets, had been a Neapolitan tradition. Durante continued this tradition with a series of vocal compositions designated by him as »Pastorale« pieces in order to indicate their relation to the Feast of Christmas and to the shepherds in the field and in the manger. The Magnificat in B flat major is doubtless the best known, most beloved, most performed, and most recorded work by him among those on Vol. 1 of his Neapolitan Christmas compositions. Even during the late nineteenth century it was published various times and praised as »the ideal setting of the Marian hymn of praise.« Durante skillfully combines contrasts and old and new in discreet and convincing fashion.

CD

27.09.2011

761203757121