Sistine Chapel Choir / Massimo Palombella O CRUX BENEDICTA

With a history that stretches back some 1500 years, this is the oldest choir still active in the world today. Part of its significance lies in the fact that it has kept going down through the centuries, most importantly during the critically important period of the Renaissance, when it found its own natural “theatre” in the Sistine Chapel. With all its frescoes, this chapel stands as a monument to beauty, and its distinctive acoustic has influenced all the choir’s accumulated repertoire, one which strikes a perfect balance between tradition and modernity. A jewel that will be passed down to future generations with all its spiritual and artistic beauty intact.

But there is more to the Sistine Chapel Choir than just its cultural legacy: it plays an active part during the papal celebrations in St Peter’s Basilica, and in the Sistine Chapel itself. As the Holy Father’s personal choir, it is called upon to play an ecumenical role, and be part of the relationship between the various Christian confessions, contributing to bringing together in art what has been separated by history and politics. This mission has led us into dialogue with leading choirs around the world, to undertaking international tours and to making our work known through recordings of our repertoire on Deutsche Grammophon.

Brass Ensemble of the Sistine Chapel THE SILVER TRUMPETS

The Silver Trumpets: the first large brass CD of the pontifical Sistine Music Chapel published by Deutsche Grammophon.
Since October 2010 the brass group is present at all the solemn celebrations presided over by the Pope in the Vatican Basilica and st. Peter's square, and in this album is collected the best of what has been performed in these years. These are live recordings during the papal celebrations, recordings ordered according to the criterion of the unfolding of the liturgical year.
The " Silver trumpets " with the March and the " wide religious " open the album. Worthy of note are the sonata " Pian And Forte " by Giovanni Gabrieli, performed during the cardinals created by the galleries of the Vatican Basilica, the " Fanfare " on the Gregorian theme of " you es petrus " composed in 2013, in the last months of the pontificate of Benedict XVI, in place of the "March de longhi". there are also some of the most beautiful music pages and escapes of J. S. Bach, the result of appropriate processing by Giuseppe Calabrese, which are normally performed at the end of the papal celebrations.

Sistine Chapel Choir / Massimo Palombella / Cecilia Bartoli VENI DOMINE

The music collections of the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana) are among the largest and most significant in the world, and have since the late 18th century been an essential resource for the study of music history and for musicolo- gical research. The finest polyphonic works of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, most of which are to be found in the Cappella Sistina and Cappella Giulia collections, have long been studied by scholars from around the world, but have become even more popular since they were transferred from the Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s to the Vatican Library itself (the Cappella Giulia material was moved in the 1930s and 1940s, the Sistine Chapel material a few decades earlier), when new indices and catalogues made them more easily accessible. The director of the Sistine Chapel Choir is in the fortunate position of having access to all the music resources of the Vatican Library. With that good fortune, however, comes a two-fold responsibility: firstly, that of rescuing long-forgotten works from neglect; and secondly, that of trying out performance practices that translate the notes on the page into patterns of sound, by comparing manuscripts and early print editions, and using all the studies and other information available to us today. 

Given the immense quantity of material housed in the Library, any search of it has to be narrowed down. For this album, for which our primary source was the Vatican Library’s Sistine Chapel collection, we decided to focus on the liturgical period of Advent and Christmas, further refining our search by consulting the various sources that describe papal celebrations over the centuries and the use of music therein. As a final search criterion, we looked at the frequency with which different works were performed as part of these papal celebrations.