Program: #18-48 Air Date: Nov 19, 2018
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Madrigals and motets around 1600, 17th century English ayres and songs, and the latest from Les Arts Florissants...
NOTE: All of the music on this program is from the Harmonia Mundi label. For more information:
I. Melancholia (Les Cris de Paris/Geoffroy Jourdain). HMM 902298.
In the chiaroscuro of a cabinet of musical curiosities at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, ten singers set out to discover works of avant-garde, representative of a genre which allows the most daring experiments.
Filled with fear and guilt, Carlo Gesualdo – the inspiring figure of this programme – embodies all the dark and enigmatic parts of the ultimate hours of the musical Renaissance.
Like him, Orlando Gibbons, William Byrd or Luca Marenzio favoured the expression of melancholy and despair in order to write incredibly modern motets and madrigals, real laboratories of harmonic and vocal innovations.
—
Come to me, grief, for ever
Lullaby, my sweet little baby
Tristitia et anxietas
Madrigali libro quinto (Madrigals Book 5)
Sacrarum Cantionum quinque vocibus (complete)
Il secondo libro de Madrigali a 5
Crudele acerba inesorabil' morte
Solo e pensoso
Draw on, sweet night
O wretched man
II. Perpetual Night: 17th Century Ayres and Songs (Lucile Richardot/Ensemble Correspondances/Sébastien Daucé). HMM 902269.
But it’s the album’s parallel, historical narrative that is, if anything, more interesting. Mining the neglected period between Dowland and Purcell for its musical interest, Richardot and her collaborators explore the French influence that helped take vocal music from court to commercial theatres, birthing that most English of musical genres: semi-opera.
Promoted from supporting act to main event, works by Lawes and Locke, Robert Ramsey and John Banister reveal rather startling musical secrets. The bold dissonance and volatile harmonic shifts of Lawes’s ‘Music, the master thy art is dead’ and ‘Whiles I this standing lake’ are painted with Caravaggio-like depth by Richardot (such a compelling Penelope in John Eliot Gardiner’s touring Ulisse, whose inky tone combines the best of countertenor brilliance and mezzo earthiness), while the Judgement of Paris is vividly dramatised in John Hilton’s ‘Rise, princely shepherd’, and operatic energy absolutely bursts from Banister’s ‘Amintas, that true hearted swain’.
The 12-strong instrumental ensemble (who elevate this recording with the embroidered detail, variety and palimpsest-shading of their accompaniments) are also enriched by a fine quartet of singers, who take consort song close to arioso in Robert Ramsey’s expansive setting of Herrick’s ‘Howl not, you ghosts and furies’, taking chamber music right to the brink of staged musical drama.
Lawes and Locke may never quite have Purcell’s pulling-power on a recording but that disparity has rarely sounded more misplaced than it does here.
III. Les Maîtres du Motet: Sébastien de Brossard/Pierre Bouteiller (Les Arts Florissants/Paul Agnew). HAF 8905300.
Sébastien de Brossard
♫ Miserere mei Deus
♫ Stabat Mater
Pierre Bouteiller
♫ Missa pro defunctis
Sébastien de Brossard
♫ Ave verum corpus
Composer Info
William Byrd, Carlo Gesualdo, Orlando Gibbons, Luca Marenzio, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Pomponio Nenna, Thomas Tomkins, Cesare Tudino, Thomas Weelkes, John Wilbye, Robert Johnson, William Lawes, John Coprario, Robert Ramsey, Nicholas Lanier, John Jenkins, John Banister, William Webb, John Hilton, James Hart, John Blow, Matthew Locke, Henry Purcell, John Jackson, Sébastien de Brossard, Pierre Bouteiller
CD Info
HMM 902298, HMM 902269, HAF 8905300