Search - Luca Marenzio, Rinaldo Alessandrini, Rossana Bertini :: Luca Marenzio: Madrigali a quattro voci, Libro Primo 1585

What was in the Pasta...

Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 09/23/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"...being served in North Italy at teh end of the 16th Century, that it nourished so many great composers? Palestrina, Frescobaldi, Pallavicino, Luzzaschi, Monteverdi....somebody should write an alphabet for children using the names of the great madrigalists from A to Z.



Here's what Rinaldo Alessandrini writes in the notes for this CD; I can't improve upon it:

"At the end of the 16th century, Rome was imbued with the spirit of Palestrina.... In a great many cases, only the texts, sung in Italian, distinguished the pieces from sacred motets: the writing was horizontal, uniform, scholarly.... they entailed, moreover, the use of contrapuntal procedures which often made the writing extremely complex. It was Marenzio, however, along time before Monteverdi, who brought about a complex and all-embracing reform of the musical language of the madrigal.....the collection ranges from the contrapuntal madrigal in classic 'prima prattica' style to radically song-like settings of pastoral texts; there are alos pieces in which the music virtually translates the sometimes dramatic psychological complexities of the texts by means of a dense, ceaselessly changing style of writing."



Rinaldo Alessandrini is of course the director of the superb vocal ensemble Concerto Italiano, whose recordings are uniformly top notch. His notes with this CD amount to a fine essay on the nature of the Italina madrigal; they're a bonus to this highly enjoyable performance.



Luca Marenzio (1533-1599) was one of the first composers in the European tradition to extract his rhythms and melodic forms from the rhythms of the language in the texts he chose to set, rather than imposing his musical intentions upon the words. The result was a huge step toward a more affective, emotional music. This first book of madrigals, in four voices rather than the usual five, was published in venice in 1585. It was widely successful, and followed quickly by four more volumes, some of them posthumous. Let's hope that Concerto Italiano, or la Venexiana, finds 'market incentive' to record more of them.



Marenzio has a style that occasionally surprises even an obsessive madrigal fan like me. His surprises are usually outbursts of complex rhythm - syncopations and tabla-like figures of quick syllables - rather than the pictorial dissonances favored by most madrigalists. In other words, you needn't worry that this CD will sound just like the other CDs of madrigals that I've cajoled you to buy, if you are a regular reader of my reviews.



The four voices in this recording are soprano Rossana Bertini, alto Claudio Cavina, tenor Giuseppe Maletto, and bass Sergio Foresti - the core soloists of Concerto Italiano - voices that prance and gallop together as closely as the four legs of a racing colt. Continuo is provide on some of the 21 madrigals by Mara Galassi on harp and/or Andrea Damiani on lute. There are extremely few recordings of marenzio available just now, so I'm delighted to declare that this one is of the highest quality. You should note, by the way, that the same CD is listed on amazon several times, with different prices and availabilities."