Search - Girolamo Frescobaldi, Rinaldo Alessandrini, Concerto Italiano :: Primo Libro Dei Madrigali

Review (from Gramophone)

Slobberer | Astoria, NY United States | 01/08/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Girolamo Frescobaldi Italian 1583-1643



Frescobaldi II primo libro di Madrigali. Concerto Italiano / Rinaldo Alessandrini. Opus 111 © OPS30-133 (53 minutes: DDD: 4/96). f^ Texts and translations included. Recorded 1995. Gramophone Editor's choice.



This story, which has a happy ending, is a curious one. Frescobaldi, in Antwerp with his Roman patron in 1608, was commissioned by a local printer to produce his first and indeed only book of madrigals. The collection seems to have little impact on contemporaries. It was never reprinted either North or South of the Alps, and in our own times its existence gradually became submerged under the weight of Frescobaldi's reputation as a composer for the keyboard. Those interested in pursuing the matter discovered that the only known surviving copy lacks one of its voice-parts. Frescobaldi's Primo libro seemed set fair to remain a footnote in the textbooks rather than a musical reality. All that changed with the discovery of a complete set of partbooks, then in a private library, a challenge that Rinaldo Alessandrini has now taken up by both editing and recording the music. The distinctive sound and approach of his Gramophone Award-winning Concerto Italiano will be familiar to all enthusiasts for Italian music of the Monteverdi period (and above all for the music of Monteverdi himself), and their many admirers will not be disappointed with the result. Their instinctive feel for the diction, sound and sense of the Italian language, married to a sophisticated and dynamic interpretational approach brings out all the rhetorical subtleties of Frescobaldi's extraordinary music, with its obvious parentage in the madrigals of Gesualdo and Monteverdi. This is virtuoso madrigal singing at its most exhilarating, all the more effective for being sometimes (though not on all tracks) imaginatively underpinned by continue instruments. The real revelation here is not so much the Concerto Italiano, whose powerfully moving performances we have come to expect, but Frescobaldi's madrigals; no one with a soul should miss them.

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