Search - Luca Marenzio, René Jacobs :: Marenzio: Madrigaux à 5 et 6 voix (Madrigals)

Beautifully Sung...

Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 09/14/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"... and still worth hearing for the earnest musicianship. But it was recorded in 1982, since which time a whole generation of young singers have devoted themselves to the cultivation of 16th Century vocal and instrumental techniques, based on 1. contemporary 16th instruction and theory from printed manuals, 2. specialization in the vocal mechanics needed to trill those trills and run those passages of itsy-bitsy notes, 3. better and deeper musicological research, 4. experience, especially the experience of pioneers in the rival of late Renaissance music, Rene Jacobs included. I doubt that Jacobs's finances depend on royalities from this disk, so I can say without guilt that it doesn't compare with the recordings of Marenzio by Rinaldo Alessandrini and the Concerto Italiano.



Luca Marenzio (1553-1599) , who made his career in Mantua, Ferrara, Firenze, and Roma, would be flabbergasted to hear his 400 surviving madrigals classified as "early music." Though he never abandoned the strict structural polyphony of the early 16th C, by reason of his harmonic inventiveness and fanatical commitment to emotional rendition of poetry, he was a the forefront of the "new" Italian madrigal school, and his influence on Gesualdo, Monteverdi, and others was significant. He was also 'avant-garde' in his playful treatment of pastoral themes, composing, as the CD notes say,"in naughty rhythms the passionate accents of the poem's transparently sexual imagery." The pastoral genres of music would continue to thrive throughout the Baroque and in the age of Mozart.



Marenzio is a composer well worth hearing, but this CD is more a collector's item than a living choice -- "early" early muisc, so to speak."