The Hilliard Ensemble

“Beautiful craftsmanship is [Hartke’s] hallmark but not his limitation: the imaginative drive is fresh, partly in being so playful, though he can also be solemn.” – New York Times Tituli / Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain is the first all Stephen Hartke disc on the New Series. His music was introduced on the label through Michelle Makarski’s 1995 solo recording Caoine. Stephen Hartke’s music grows out of a variety of impulses and inspirations, including poetry, plainchant, the paintings of Joan Mir. In the case of both Tituli and Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain, the inspiration comes, at least initially, from words: Tituli is built on fragments of inscriptions carved and scratched on ancient Roman artifacts, and Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain is a setting of a poem by Japanese poet and sculptor Takamura Kotaro (1883-1956).

The blend between the voices is finely controlled, the tone mellow and the tuning spectacularly accurate, giving rise to an organ-like sonority that is genuinely thrilling,” wrote Gramophone magazine, praising the Hilliard Ensemble’s four singers, who excelled in an extraordinary variety of music over a 40-year career. This seven-CD collection extends from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, offering music by composers from England, France, Flanders and Germany.

Carlo Gesualdo's name will always conjure up a special image: When he discovered that his wife had been unfaithful, he had her and her lover murdered and left on his palace steps, impaled on the same sword. Ghastly, but gripping–and, oddly enough, his harmonies, dissonances, upsetting chromatic passages, and general complexity can also be seen as "ghastly but gripping." Gesualdo was wealthy enough that he never had to depend on a patron; he could therefore write whatever he pleased, in whatever, far-out (to this day), experimental style he chose.