Pacelli / Bertolusi / Anerio: The Blossoming Vine – The Sixteen / Dougan

   in Early Music Today (Sep, 2014)
This volume is the second in The Sixteen’s series of Polish music, but – unlike the first, which featured the Polish composer Bartlomiej P?kiel – this disc contains pieces by three Italian composers connected with Marian worship. The best known of them is Giovanni Francesco Anerio (c 1567–1630) who principally took Palestrina as his model, adapted his celebrated ‘Marcellus’ mass and based his own double-choir Missa Pulchra es, included here, on Palestrina’s five-voice setting of a text from the Song of Songs. The dissemination of the Italian baroque is a subject of endless fascination in which trade routes, political and religious affinities, and the print trade play an important part.

Anerio’s …