Classic FM Feature David’s Top 5

We are thrilled to announce that Classic FM have interviewed David Bates for their website in the run up to our St John’s Smith Square Concert of Acis and Galatea on 2 November at 7.30pm. They asked him to choose his five, favourite early music choral pieces and here are his choices:

The 5 best pieces of early choral music – according to an expert

By Elizabeth Davis

“David Peter Bates is the founder and artistic director of La Nuova Musica , an ensemble that specialises in performing music from the Renaissanceand Baroque eras. So it’s fair to say that he knows his early choral onions……..”

Click HERE Read the full article on Classic FM’s website

Tags: Classic FM, The 5 best pieces of early choral music

Two of Bach's finest cantatas, both for solo alto, composed in Weimar (1714) and Leipzig (1726) respectively, are here coupled with Pergolesi's Stabat Mater of 1736, the eighteenth century's favourite sacred work. The gap between the austere Lutheran piety and searing Mediterranean emotionalism might seem unbridgeable. Yet Bach so admired the composition of his Neopolitan colleague that he made his own 'parody' of it to a German text. On this recording, La Nuova Musica and it's two eminent soloists display equal mastery of both idioms. Counter-tenor Tim Mead is praised for his “alluring...consistently excellent” interpretations (The New York Times). With his “rich, mellifluous sound” (Guardian), he is recognised as one of the finest across the generations of counter-tenors. Described as having a voice of bell-like clarity with an impeccable vocal technique and powerful stage presence, Lucy Crowe has established herself as one of the leading lyric sopranos of her generation.
harmonia mundi HMM907589

François Couperin served as harpsichordist to Louis XIV and was famed for reforming elegant chamber music of the French court in the more impassioned Italian style of the time. For his Leçons de Ténèbres, a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, “Couperin le Grand” fused devotional expression with a dramatic performing style embodied here by sopranos Lucy Crowe and Elizabeth Watts. Two Trio Sonatas and a Stabat Mater by Sébastien de Brossard round out this luminous programme.

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David Bates directs La Nuova Musica in a pair of contrasting settings of Psalm 109. Handel's masterful and ambitious HWV282 was penned in 1707 during a youthful visit to Italy. Vivaldi's vivid and economical RV807 (his third Dixit Dominus) was long mistakenly attributed to Baldassare Galuppi; it probably dates from the early 1730s. Rounding out the programme is Vivaldi's dazzling motet for solo voice, "In furore iustissimae irae", featuring soprano Lucy Crowe.

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A dazzling Royal trio. Founded in 1719 as the first opera company in the English-speaking world, the Royal Academy of Music commissioned and premiered some of the finest 18th-century operas, including Handel’s Giulio Cesare. Renowned American countertenor Lawrence Zazzo is joined by La Nuova Musica and David Bates for a snapshot of the Academy’s hits circa 1725, featuring arias by Handel, Ariosti, and Bononcini.

harmonia mundi HMU807590

The birth of the Oratorio was thanks to Giacomo Carissimi and his exceptional setting of Jephte. Along side this trail blazer, LNM perform Oratorios by Carissimi’s Student M A Charpentier alongside delicious instrumental preludes by Sebastien De Brossard. Sebastien de Brossard: Sonate en trio

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La Nuova Musica
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harmonia mundi HMM907589

A superb disc of baroque vocal music. "Lucy Crowe and Tim Mead withstand comparison with the finest on disc. Their voices blend ideally in the duets, and their stylish phrasing in the arias is especially rewarding here. Crowe’s runs and trills delight in her jaunty Inflammatus, while the emotional crux of the work, the alto’s Fac ut portem, is sublimely phrased by Mead, easily a match for David Daniels and Andreas Scholl in earlier versions.”

Hugh Canning - The Sunday Times

Leçons De Ténèbres by Couperin

harmonia mundi HMU807659

Music for Holy Week. François Couperin served as harpsichordist to Louis XIV and was famed for reforming elegant chamber music of the French court in the more impassioned Italian style of the time. For his Leçons de Ténèbres, a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, “Couperin le Grand” fused devotional expression with a dramatic performing style embodied here by sopranos Lucy Crowe and Elizabeth Watts. Two Trio Sonatas and a Stabat Mater by Sébastien de Brossard round out this luminous programme.

The 5 best pieces of early choral music – according to an expert

Click HERE Read the full article on Classic FM’s website

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