CD 46

Music from Stams Monastery XX

This CD presents the festive concert  celebrating  Stefan Paluselli’s 250th birthday in 1998. Now that his works of orchestral and chamber music have almost all been introduced by our concerts over the last few years, this concert focuses exclusively  on  his  church music. Although Paluselli was the conductor of the multi-part voices and instrumentalists at Stams Monastery from 1791 on,  he  wrote  sacred  music only as a sideline. For festive performances  of  liturgical music  he  would  make  use of the substantial wealth of excellent  compositions  by other  authors  available  at Stams. Paluselli’s few works of church music exhibit his usual striving for originality. He did not write masses in the  sense  customary  at  the time, with instrumental pomp forming an equivalent to the superabundant art decorating the ecclesiastical space, but intricate gems to be performed in more modest settings. The three  masses  recorded  here belong  to  the  Franciscan mass type. Corresponding to St Francis of Assisi’s ideal of poverty, producing them does not  take  much,  the  scoring usually  being  limited  to  a few voices singing with organ accompaniment, the liturgical texts  being  in  abbreviated form.  Certainly  of  lasting impact  is  the  introductory hymn for vespers on the Feast of the Holy Blood (1 July) for choir and string orchestra with its incomparable solemn touch (track 1).

Track 1, 3:36

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