# rediscoveries



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I was just reflecting on Biber, whose music (if wikipedia misleads me not) was virtually unknown to most listeners a decade ago, but today is regularly mentioned as one of our favorite Baroque composers. Zelenka seems to be a similar case.

And of course in, say, 1968 almost the entire repertoire of Renaissance music was unknown to most listeners, with exceptions like a few works by Palestrina, Allegri, Byrd.... Maybe some others. But almost all recordings of even a figure like Josquin are less than 40 years old.

A few years ago a work by Pergolesi, _Septum verba a Christo_, was discovered to be authentic and has been recorded.

This has been going on a long time - we all know the story about Mendelssohn performing Bach.

So, what else is there? What are the great rediscoveries of recent years?


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## SimonNZ (Jul 12, 2012)

Hildegad of Bingen would be the first to jump to mind. I think the first recordings of her music appeared as late as 1981-2, and of course the Gothic Voices album from '82 was a pretty huge success.

Labels like DG's Archiv and Telefunken's Das Alte Werke were bringing out some Biber and Zelenka recordings in the sixties - I take it you're thinking more of the moment they cross over from being just another curiosity to something closer to canonical or of more widely accepted importance.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I think Wikipedia may be misleading. Our local public radio station played a lot of Biber as far back as the 1980s. Of course this is still recent by my standards.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Handel's _Gloria_ was rediscovered in 2001, nearly 300 years after he composed it.


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## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

Naive has for the last decade been issuing performances of Vivaldi's works under the series title "Vivaldi Edition." They are based on the discovery of autograph copies of Vivaldi's works which are now housed in the National Library in Turin. I don't know Vivaldi well enough to say how much these autographs differ from the standard performance editions, but included in this collection are several volumes listed as "New Discoveries."

















Even more noteworthy was the discovery of the 40-part Mass by Alessandro Striggio, which scholars now recognize was the work that prompted Tallis to compose his famous 40-voice Spem in Alium. Tallis, I gather, had not heard Striggio, but Striggio's work was reported to him.










Here's a video on it:


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Another very worthwhile Baroque rediscovery was Michelangelo Falvetti's _Il Diluvio Universale_.









He was a 17th-century Sicilian who didn't get a mention in the 1980 _Grove_, and I think at the time (2011) this was the first-ever recording of any of his work. It's a fantastic find, a wonderfully vivid oratorio (about the Biblical Flood, if you haven't worked that out from the title).


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

What do you guys think of Louis Couperin's premier cycle de fugues et de fantasie? I have never managed to get into them, and I noticed that they seem to have been rejected by organists in recordings and recitals (obviously apart from Moroney.) Glen Wilson claims they're not really Louis Couperin's work.


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