Alessandro Scarlatti

This recording was based on a live performance that both singers gave with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1974.

Most of the repertoire from that concert made its way onto the recording, with the exception of extended excerpts from Alessandro Scarlatti's pastoral cantata, Endimione e Cynthia, only one aria from which was included on the record.

A live recording of this concert has recently been published on YouTube, and I'd love to play for you the final duet between Blegin and von Stade, Del tuo ciglio vezzoso ad un lampo.

Del tuo ciglio vezzoso ad un lampo.

And the choruses in particular are very short, but really everything is a lot shorter than in later styles of opera.

We've listened to some of the cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti and some of the oratorios of Carissimi.

And in one of those episodes, I talked about the da capo aria, where the aria is lengthened by going back to the top or the head or da capo.

And so that just kind of lengthens out and allows the aria to be really the expression of emotion while repeating a lot of the words.

That was the Gloria of today's Mass Ordinary by Palestrina, written about six hundred and fifty years ago.

We come now to the second part of the proper, the gradual: Salvum fac populum tuum from Psalm 27, "Save Your People, O Lord." We'll hear this in a motet setting by the Neapolitan Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti.

The performers are La Stagione Armonica.

[choir singing]

[choir singing][singing]

That was today's gradual in a motet arrangement by Alessandro Scarlatti.

Next in the order of the sung Mass is the Alleluia Lauda anima mea, "Praise the Lord, O my soul." As luck would have it, one of the great composers of the Renaissance, Orlando di Lasso, set this text as a motet.

We hear it performed by the group I Fiamminghi, a Dutch ensemble based in Tuscany.