Search - Consort of Musicke :: Schutz: Madrigals

Still Golden After 23 Years!

Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 08/22/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I scarcely realized, when this recording was first released 23 years ago, that it would remain the best performance of Schuetz's Opus 1 for my whole adult life. But it's even better than that; it's the gold standard for performance of late Renaissance madrigals by any composer. The Consort of Musicke navigates through the complex rhythmic shifts and acute chromatic dissonances of these madrigals with never a hint of insecurity. Every chord is perfectly tuned. Every melodic shape is gracefully carved through the acoustic waters of polyphony. A lot of the glory can be assigned to the young Emma Kirkby, whose sky-lark soprano defines the timbre of the madrigals yet who sings with amazingly unselfish attention to ensemble balance.



Heinrich Schuetz is often labeled as the greatest German composer before Bach. He might just as easily be called the greatest Italian composer after Monteverdi. These madrigals are sung in Italian, and they are thoroughly in the style and structure of Monteverdi, Marenzio, and Gesualdo. They were written during Schuetz's years of youthful study in Venice and constituted in effect his graduation thesis. Thus they are not examples of Schuetz's later originality but rather demonstrations of his mastery of the Italian style. Even so, Schuetz excels. The chromatic eccentricities and bizarre phrasings of Gesualdo or Marenzio result from those composers' subordination of melody to the emotive affect of their poetic texts. In Schuetz's madrigals, the same shocking dissonances and flittering rhythms not only mimic the verbal expressiveness but also develop purely musical structures in a coherent synthesis. In other words, Schuetz in his first and last efforts was already the best Italian madrigalist of all.



Forget all that technical stuff now as quickly as you can. Just listen to the voices and let your feelings melt with them.



How strange it is that the only available edition of this recording should come to new listeners from Japan, with kanji and katakana for program notes! Fortunately, the texts are included in the original Italian."