Missa 1724 cover
Released

As the popularity of baroque music has grown over the past several decades, one happy outcome has been an increase in scholarship that has brought the work of outstanding but formerly obscure composers to public attention for the first time. One of these is the Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka, whose large-scale sacred music has been experiencing something of a renaissance in recent years. This album is interesting in that it offers not one of his many Mass settings, but rather a bunch of Mass fragments that are put together to form a sort of imaginative recreation of what one of his Masses might have sounded like in 1724. All of it is sumptuously beautiful and exquisitely performed by Collegium Vocale 1704.

Rick Anderson

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