Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano bring their attention to a fascinating and highly rewarding 17th-century Italian composer, Alessandro Stradella, principally celebrated today for his oratorios and operas. This album presents five of his seventeen motets, deposited in the Bibliothèque Estense in Modena at the end of the seventeenth century. These are, for the most part, world premieres.Rinaldo Alessandrini gathered together motets that are mainly relevant to the cult of the Virgin Mary, written for specific circumstances such as the Nativity, or the Immaculate Conception, or for more generic feasts, on texts chosen for each occasion, including one by Stradella himself (Exultate in Deo fideles).REVIEW:As with so much of Stradella’s extraordinarily prolific output, none of the pieces on this new album (with one exception) has been previously recorded. This judicious selection of works drawn from three manuscripts of unknown provenance demonstrates the extraordinary variety of styles and approaches of which the composer was capable at his most impressive.— Gramophone
