Deutsche Grammophon
For over ten years the Gabrieli Consort & Players have recorded exclusively with Deutsche Grammophon Archiv. Their first release on the label, Venetian Vespers, won the 1993 Gramophone Award and was nominated for a Grammy. Subsequent recordings of music by Palestrina, Praetorius, Morales, Purcell, Handel and Bach have won several major European prizes including the Diapason d'Or, Deutcher Schallplattenpreis and Edison Award.
The ensemble gained critical acclaim in its first decade for spectacular reconstructions of music for great historic events - particularly its best-selling recording of A Venetian Coronation 1595 which was released in 1990. Building on this success, the Gabrieli Consort & Players have been regular visitors to the major festivals and concert halls of Europe and beyond, and have made numerous television and radio appearances in a variety of repertoire.
Paul McCreesh's liturgical reconstructions continued with Biber's magnificent 40-part Missa Salisburgensis, which was performed at St Paul's Cathedral for the City of London Festival and to open a new festival at Santiago de Compostela, and released on CD in 1998. The ensemble's recording of J. S. Bach's Epiphany Mass, set in a liturgical context, was awarded the Diapason d'Or in 1999. Other highlights of that year include the ensemble's residency at a new festival in Venice, where they performed Venetian Vespers in the Basilica di San Marco, thereby fulfilling a long-held ambition.
The ensemble made their US debut in 1997 with a programme of music by Gabrieli, and returned there in 1999 and 2000 to perform Praetorius's Christmas Mass in New York, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor and Boston among others. To celebrate the "Bach Year" 2000, the ensemble toured throughout Europe with performances of his Easter Oratorio and Magnificat.
More recently the ensemble has received the highest critical acclaim for recordings of Bach's St Matthew Passion which was lauded by many critics including The Guardian newspaper: "The dramatic impact of this unique new version of the St Matthew Passion is astonishing, thanks not only to the incisiveness of the performance under Paul McCreesh, but to the vivid immediacy of the recorded sound". The ensemble's first opera release - Gluck's Paride ed Elena - came out in May 2005 to high critical praise. With soloists Magdalena Kožena, Susan Gritton and Gillian Webster starring, the release followed a sell-out performance at the Barbican Hall in London described by Opera Magazine as "one of the happiest evenings of the operatic year". And the latest release is Mozart's Mass in C minor featuring the sopranos Camilla Tilling and Sarah Connolly who also shine with thrilling virtuosity in the two added dramatic cantatas Beethoven's Ah Perfido and Haydn's Scena de Berenice. For details of the ensemble's upcoming Monteverdi Vespers release go to the Recordings section.
For more information go to the Deutsche Grammophon website.