Lasso: Requiem

In his complete works of more than eighty masses, Roland de Lassus left behind only two Requiems, which unfortunately cannot be assigned as a funeral mass for a specific person. One of these Requiems, the four-part Missa pro defunctis, was published in Paris in 1577; the library of an abbey in Augsburg possesses a transposed manuscript of this mass, which is intended for an ensemble of low voices (tenors, baritones, and basses). In addition, this handwritten copy contains a Dies Irae, which is missing from the Paris edition. The second and five-part Requiem was published in 1589, five years before Lassus’ death. Vox Luminis brings these two compositions together here with the contrasting timbres of the two vocal ensembles: the "seriousness" of the four-part Requiem and the "light" of the five-part one.