Missa Criola is one of the most often played compositions of contemporary classic music. This particular piece of music made its composer Ariel Ramirez (born 1921) famous. The first recording was done by the composer in October 1964 in Buenos Aires, but the first public performance took place only three years later March 12th 1967 in Düseldorf. The Mess sang according to Castilian text approved in 1967 by Liturgical Committee of Roman Catholic Church is a remarkable combination of composer's own melodies and traditional Argentinian and South American ones. It usually took for the performance one or two soloists, a choir with minimum 40 singers, organ (or piano) and some instrumentalists playing traditional local instruments like: charango (five string guitar), quena (rustic flute), siku etc., and many percussion instruments. Jose Carreras (born Dec 5th 1946) is the star of this Phillips 1987 recording. This year was a pick of Jose's carrier that started 18 years earlier but it was still same year when he collapsed in Paris during recording with Kiri TeKanawa. He was diagnosed with leukemia and it seemed he had quite a short time left. Just a year later after recovery he was back on the stage singing live for 150 thousands people in Barcelona. The Philips (Philips Classic Production) recording took place in Spain, August 1987, in Santuario de la Bien Aparecida, located in beautiful Cantabria. It was a digital recording, digitally processed and released on a

It is one of those records that can touch your soul and make you even cry. Listening to pure, spirited voice of Jose Carreras you just can't ignore emotions flowing to you with the music. I know Philips recording very well , always considered it really good and had no particular reservations. Mr Winston Ma's K2HD version shows what progress is about. It shows you also that if you can't compare a recording, device or system with the better one there will be no progress, you will learn nothing. This new remaster is simply brilliant. It is hard to find a better description for what FIM did with this recording. This is an emotional statement but it is difficult to stay cool, if FIM was not to issue any other record ever, than this one should be its top achievement. Cymbals are strong, deep, three-dimensional, and incredibly “gold”, sweet. And the voices… Dear Lord! Carreras expresses so many emotions, modulations, vibrations with his voice, that you can't help dropping a tear or two. What has been done in this issue can be easily shown using the choir as an example. Before, it was just nice with just correct separation. Now it is deeper, wider and you can follow each singer without a problem. Everything in the recording is now deeper and rich – starting from timpani through all the instruments you will find each of them more real, live sounding. By comparison you can hear that original Philips version was a bit bright and harsh. K2HD version sounds so differently from the first note that you could tell it was a different recording. The sound is richer and warmer. There is more resolution. It's more realistic. All the recordings in the world should sound like this one. So we should really congratulate Philips sound engineers who prepared the master-tape and managed to put all those information on it. Mr Ma on the other hand is the first one who managed to show us everything that was on that tape. For this particular edition I would like to establish some special price – more special than Annual Reward for 2009. I have no idea yet how it will be called but I know it will come for sure.