Carissimi: Eight Motets

Giacomo Carissimi was one of the most admired of seventeenth-century Italian composers. The maestro from Marino, near Rome, acquired a Europe-wide fame at an early age and excelled in church music. Commonly employing texts that modify or amplify passages from the scriptures, rather than taking those texts verbatim, Carissimi employed all his genius for vocal melodic lines and accompanying instrumentation to fashion a sequence of spellbinding masterpieces. Foremost among these is Usquequo peccatores which, through its size and length, blurs the very distinction between motet and oratorio. This is the fourth Naxos release of music by Carissimi from this ensemble.