LATEST ALBUM
MUSIC IN GOLDEN-AGE FLORENCE, 1250-1750
LA MORRA | THEATRO DEI CERVELLI | FRANCESCO CORTI
Label: Ramée/Outhere (RAM 2206), 2024
Track I-3: Vergine donzella imperadrice (anonymous)
This 2-CD set and the book that accompanies it — Anthony M. Cummings, Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250-1750 (University of Chicago Press) — are designed to enable readers and listeners to enter the sound world of late-medieval and early-modern Florence, “the most provocative of Italian cities”, in the words of historian J. R. Hale. Despite the enviable place Florence occupies in the historical imagination, its music-historical importance is not as well-understood as it should be. Yet if Florence was the city of Dante Alighieri, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Galileo Galilei, it was also the birthplace of the Renaissance madrigal, opera, and the piano. This set of recordings, which survey the principal surviving genres of music in Florence in the half-millennium between c. 1250 and c. 1750, was to provide a “virtual” evocation of the extraordinary musical culture of golden-age Florence, one of unsurpassed importance.
LA MORRA (Corina Marti & Michal Gondko, direction) (CD I): Doron Schleifer, Ivo Haun de Oliveira, Daniel Mentes, Matthieu Romanens, Jean-Christophe Groffe (voices), Corina Marti (clavicimbalum, recorders), Michal Gondko (plectrum lute, Renaissance lute), Ziv Braha (Renaissance lute), Vojtěch Jakl (fiddle)
THEATRO DEI CERVELLI (Andrés Locatelli, direction) (CDI/II): see printed CD booklet for the list of performers
FRANCESCO CORTI (harpsichord & organ) (CD I/II)
With an introductory essay by Anthony M. Cummings.
This album was made possible with the financial support of Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania.
REVIEWS
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(LA LIBRE BELGIQUE) (…) “Voici un volume, très savant, qui ambitionne de restituer la place qu’occupe la cité des Medici sur la carte de la musique, encapsulant un “âge d’or” entre 1250 et 1750.”
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(BBC RADIO 3) (…) “There’s so much variety on this, over such a long historical period and so many different genres, but the quality is very good across the disc and it’s very varied. I think it’s quite a sumptuous recording.”
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(MUSIK AN SICH) (…) “Ein derart verdichtetes Programm, das in viele Repertoirenischen hineinlauscht und Raritäten in Serie präsentiert, ist ambitioniert. Dennoch wirkt die vorliegende Dokumentation erstaunlich geschlossen, wohl auch, weil sich bestimmte Charakteristika über Epochengrenzen hinweg halten, gerade bei älterer Musik. (…) Zudem sorgt die historisch informierte Darbietung durch zwei renommierte Ensembles, La Morra und Theatro dei Cervelli, sowie einen Experten für historische Tasteninstrumente, Francesco Corti, für ein hohes, integrierendes Niveau.” [full review]
