Here Hopkinson Smith, the poet of pluck, takes up five different kinds of lutes plus a vihuela de mano and a Baroque guitar, each of which sounds fantastic in his hands. Whether it's a 13-course Baroque lute for Bach and Weiss; an 11-course Baroque lute for Mouton, Gaultier, or de Gallot; a 10-course Renaissance lute for Kapsperger; an 8-course ...
The material on this disc may be a footnote to musical history, but, as anyone who has read David Foster Wallace can tell you, the best stuff is sometimes in the footnotes. La tavola cromatica contains music that might have been associated with a viol academy of early seventeenth century Rome, established by Cardinal Francesco Barberini -- scion ...
Blind lutenist Matthew Wadsworth's last release was devoted to lute songs by the intriguing but not essential English composer Philip Rosseter. Here, Wadsworth gets his chance to do the grand tour of seventeenth century European lute composers (he uses a lute and a theorbo), and the results are stunning. The disc works well as an introduction to ...
Anne-Sofie von Otter's Music for a While finds her diving into geographically diverse songs of the Baroque period with the same flair and joyful curiosity that animate all of her projects. She shows a refreshing willingness to change her vocal sound and technique to suit the task at hand, leaving whatever operatic ego she carries with her at the ...
It's hard to say what the name "Catacoustic Consort" is supposed to mean, but this, the group's debut disc, holds lots of promise. These "Italian Dramatic Laments" are soprano solos, accompanied by continuo group of theorbo, viola da gamba, and Baroque harp. Leading off the disc is the Lamento d'Arianna of Monteverdi, the only surviving section of ...
This ambitious German release takes an unusual cross section of music from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which is conventionally divided up by composer, country, genre, or patron. Here the Ensemble Daedalus and its director Roberto Festa instead examine a single affect, melancholy, as it manifested itself in various places ...
Before the 1990s, Italian composer Giulio Caccini was known only to experts in the field of early seventeenth century music; he was a shadowy figure from the earliest days of opera whose work was scattered and little known even to scholars. Caccini was one of the first composers to promote the idea that a melody line, sung by a single voice with a ...
Harmonia Mundi's Fantastic Style is a two-for-the-price-of-one combination of two great albums by Romanesca: Phantasticus, originally released in 1996, and Schmelzer: Violin Sonatas from 1998. Phantasticus takes as its point of departure an extract from the writings of seventeenth century theorist Athanasius Kircher, who among his classification ...
This disc, apparently compiled from preexisting recordings, was made to accompany an art exhibition covering the papal sphere in Rome in the early seventeenth century. Given that it is meant, perhaps, to illustrate general aesthetic principles, one might forgive the omission of texts for the vocal pieces. Not all the music here would normally be ...
A sea change occurred in music between 1584, when Palestrina wrote his Shostakovich-like renunciation of secular music in a dedication to Pope Gregory XIII ("I blush and grieve to think," he wrote, that he had been one of the composers who wrote spiritually lowly madrigals of love), and 1623, when Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (an Italian, despite ...
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