Refreshing new sacred music
★★★★
The music is firmly rooted in the tradition of Gregorian chant and the great Italian polyphonists but flows from the pen of a 21st-century Roman. Claudio Dall’Albero spent decades in the Vatican, where his studies of contrapuntal technique gave rise to new sacred music… with attractive dissonance.
(Stephen Pritchard – The Guardian)
His music, which is carefully crafted in a modal-contrapuntal framework and coupled with an approachable “attractively dissonant” harmonic idiom, which creates a kind of antiqua dissonantia that “looks to the past with the knowledge of the present”.
(Robert Delcamp - American Record Guide)
The harmonic encounters, at times satisfying, at others harsh, originate in the movement of the parts, so as to achieve a balance between the archaic nuances of the melody and the more contemporary color of the dissonance; and between the melodic line's vocal sensitivity and attention to bringing out the specific characteristics of the two instruments.
(Carla Di Lena - Piano Time)
Dall’Albero confidently sets of important text with block chords, moving into contrasting polyphonic sections that introduce a hint of dissonance.
(James Manheim - AllMusic Review)
His compositions are so limpid and beautiful that for the listener they sound at times like medieval music in their flow.
(Naxos Japan)
One of the most famous composers of sacred music of our time, the Italian Claudio Dall'Albero, uses the form of Renaissance polyphony, which once again proves to be inexhaustible. The millenary traditions together with the ancient liturgical texts elevate the listener's soul into eternity.
(Árpád Marton - Magyar Katolikus Rádió)