The Cozzolani Project's first new release is one of the composer’s most immediately appealing works, in which she vividly captures the brilliance and wonder of the Christmas narrative. The anonymous text alludes to Luke 2:10 and 14, and in Cozzolani’s hands it is infused with a gleeful exuberance and a touch of chromatic mystery. The Angels (two sopranos) are “glorious” and the shepherds (scored for alto and tenor) are at first astonished and then jubilant.

In a theatrical gesture at the end of her Christmas dialogue Gloria in altissimis, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani instructs the four singers to “soften the voice as if, little by little, going away” in imitation of the Angelic choir disappearing as they ascend back to Heaven after announcing their good news to the awestruck shepherds.

Gloria in altissimis is designated in the part books (download facsimile) as a “Dialogue between the angels and the shepherds, for the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord” (Dialogo fra gli Angeli, ed I Pastori, nella Natività di N.S.). Robert Kendrick observed that “of all the new genres found in Seicento Milan, the dialogue was the most central, a phenomenon evident in Cozzolani’s motet books…providing a vehicle for the expression of individual affect, whether of generic figures, scriptural characters, or historical saints…” The dialogue embodied the idea of direct communication between humans and the divine that dominated Milanese spiritual writing of the first half of the 17th Century.

Eight of Cozzolani’s works are explicitly designated as “dialogues”, four in each of the two surviving collections. As Kendrick notes, The range of works so designated is remarkable, encompassing as it does acclamatory (Psallite superi, O caeli cives), biblical (Gloria in altissimis for Christmas, Maria Magdalene stabat for Easter), consolatory (Ave mater dilectissima), and liturgical (Beatus vir) settings, as well as the only two penitential motets in Cozzolani’s entire output (O mi domine, and Quid miseri).

Magnificat first performed Gloria in altissimis on the San Francisco Early Music Society series in December 1999. It was performed again in December 2009 on our own series in a program structured around the Midnight Mass. Visit cozzolani.com for more information about Cozzolani and to download a facsimile reproduction of the original publication of this piece.

Magnificat
Warren Stewart, artistic director

Catherine Webster, soprano
Andrea Fullington, soprano
Suzanne Jubenville, alto
Karen Clark, tenor (alto)
David Tayler, theorbo
Hanneke van Proosdij, organ