John Wilbye Madrigals

To welcome the spring, British ensemble I Fagiolini puts aside it's beloved Monteverdi to uncover it's own national heritage: the best of John Wilbye's classic Golden Age madrigals. Whilst his oeuvre may have been small (just 75 works that we know of and most just a couple of minutes long), time and again, in these exquisite cameos, Wilbye delivers what might be reckoned the ultimate madrigal experience. The plangent dissonance of 'Draw on, sweet night' and 'Weep, weep, mine eyes' perfectly evoke English melancholy, while 'Sweet honey-sucking bees' and 'Adieu, sweet Amaryllis' are such sheer pleasure to sing that many listeners will scrabble to unearth old scores. This album is, in a nutshell, 75 minutes of madrigalian bliss! Rediscover or enjoy anew this central part of English choral culture, strangely out of fashion for so long, sung by a group that has matured into the repertoire like a good wine.

Melancholic poetry provided endless nourishment for musical creativity in the late Renaissance. In his first recording for harmonia mundi, Geoffroy Jourdain leads Les Cris de Paris in music from the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From Bryd to Gesualdo, Italian and English madrigals rub shoulders with motets and Tenebrae responsories, finding pleasure even in meditating on what causes one's pain.

This charming record is as outstanding technically as in its artistic merits. Warmly recommended. –The Monthly Guide to Recorded Music

John Dowland - The Collected Works - The Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley (1997) {Decca–L'Oiseau-Lyre 12CDs}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 3.83 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 2.07 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 191 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1997 Decca / L'Oiseau-Lyre | 452 563-2
Classical / Renaissance / Vocal Music / Chamber Music / Lute

Both the music and this actual product are masterpieces. John Dowland's collected works here - covering 12 compact discs - exhibit the depth and power of this composer, a composer who many now regard as suffering from clinical depression. I doubt that the issue of the diagnosis of Dowland's depression can ever be settled, however, it is certainly obvious from his music, so completely on display here, that he was a man with very dark depths and corners in his mind. Dowland's various manifestations and "takes" on his own tune, "Flow my tears"/"Lachrimae" are here. This tune has haunted me ever since I first heard it when I was a child. It seems to sum up Dowland's feelings - at least Dowland seems to have thought so.

A collection of 25 madrigals from 23 different composers, from the famous to the obscure, make up this Elizabethan curiosity, published in 1601 by Thomas Morley. A musical dedication to Queen Elizabeth 1, The Triumphs of Oriana displays the talents of English songwriters, long-overshadowed by their European counterparts, conjuring up an image of an idealised and mythical England of old.

The songs in this collection span a period of over four hundred years, yet they show a fundamental unity of style which illustrates how static a genre based in a tradition of apparently untrained music-making necessarily remained. Tudor court composers conjure up an Arcadian world of innocence, while later works often derive from indigenous folk-songs. Either way, the secular song packages and sanitises a dangerous world of rustic abandon for an audience more restrictively cultured.

In 1601, English composer Thomas Morley published a volume of madrigals called The Triumphs of Oriana. The music was intended to honor the aging Queen Elizabeth I, referred to as Oriana for reasons about which historians disagree (one version of the story is given in the detailed and informative notes by Thomas Elias). Each madrigal concluded with some variant of the couplet "Then sang the shepherds and nymphs of Diana/Long live fair Oriana," allowing the composer (there were 23 different ones for the 25 pieces) to strut his polyphonic stuff at the end of the song.