Striggio : Messe à 40 et 60 voix. Niquet.

   in Early Music Today (Sep, 2012)
Were he around to witness it, Alessandro Striggio would surely be surprised by his renascent fame: this album follows last year’s recording of the Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno by I Fagiolini, but places the mass within a reconstructed Florentine service for the feast day of St John the Baptist (the city’s patron), alongside works by Orazio Benevoli and Francesco Corteccia. Different too is Hervé Niquet’s choice of instrumentation for the mass: instruments double, rather than replace, voices and two entire choirs sing a cappella. While it is probably fair to suggest that Striggio’s polychoral megalith sometimes suffers from a loss of direction and variety, what more than makes …