la Reverdie

With Lux laetitiae , La Reverdie continues its discographical journey after the success of its most recent production devoted to Francesco Landini: from the Florence of the great blind composer of the fourteenth century, to the splendour of the Este court in fifteenth-century Ferrara! The programme presents twelve pieces from an important codex that belonged to the court, in which fashionable composers such as Guillaume Dufay and John Dunstaple tried their hand at the motet genre. The performances combine six voices with a rich array of instruments and aim to reproduce the resplendent sound of the Este cappella at the time of Lionello and Borso, passionate patrons who attracted to Ferrara many talented artists charged with adorning the court with art, beauty and harmony. An exploration of the prolific tradition of the Marian cult which, from the twelfth century onwards, was manifested in an extraordinary wealth of musical forms and which, in the fifteenth century, resulted in grandiose compositions that can still captivate us today with their complexity and fascination.

In the Middle Ages Italy was not the unified country that we would like to think of since the nineteenth century, following the Romantic era and the formation of the modern state. It was quite the contrary, a nebula in which there was opposition between the great divisions of the Tyrrhenian West and the Adriatic East, as of the South with its memories of Greece and the North which sought links with the Germanic world in a kind of prefiguration of modern Europe: the Alpine range did not constitute a real barrier.

Arcana's O tu chara Sciença, featuring Italian period instrument and vocal ensemble La Reverdie, is quite simply one of the best-ever recordings of music from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Firstly, the very premise of the program transmits a complete understanding of the theoretical function of music in the late middle ages; music, at least among the learned, was neither an empty entertainment offered in the court or public square, nor was it purely understood as something to hang a sacred service upon to help it turn corners more smoothly. Music was a science on a level with mathematics, astronomy, and geometry.

The Arcana recordings by the Italian ensemble La Reverdie approach, in their esoteric beauty, the medieval recordings by the American quartet Anonymous 4. There are, however, great differences. The La Reverdie recordings are not only based on minute scientific research but also on philosophical concepts, these usually being explained in the form of heady intellectual essays printed in the accompanying booklets in four languages. The music itself is eclectic, being carefully selected from manuscripts held in European university libraries.

Although it's not unusual for artistic and literary communities to revisit and emulate the ideals of an earlier time (the 18th-century reverence for classical antiquity, for example), the present age has shown an interest in medieval music that's certainly unprecedented–and, on evidence of hundreds of recordings and the work of dozens of performing ensembles, its practitioners certainly are among the most accomplished and knowledgeable musicians and scholars ever known. This excellent recording from the medieval ensemble La Reverdie provides more support to such a claim. Rather than just dig up a bunch of old manuscripts, arrange a few obscure tunes, and dump them onto a program with a suitably poetic title, La Reverdie dug up a bunch of old manuscripts, arranged a few obscure tunes, and intelligently and skillfully organized them into an engaging program that brims with lively, lovely music and imaginative interpretations.

The "laude" of the Renaissance Italian city-states have survived in just two manuscripts; until recently they constituted one of the last major genres of Early Music to be reconstructed and performed. Essentially, they were the music commissioned by the guild-like confraternities (with members from the middle and lower economic classes of the cities) for performance by the members and by well-paid professional soloists, at festivals and in the side-chapels of the cathedrals where most lay people attended to their religious devotions. In short, the music of the people rather than the priests.

Edmund Wylfing (ca. 844-870), a Saxon king of East Anglia, virgin and martyr, was the the first patron-saint of England. The Italian ensemble La Reverdie brings to life again his story through a medieval liturgical drama, in three parts: life, passion and miracles.

With this new recording, La Reverdie explores the well-known collection of medieval songbooks known as Carmina Burana. The manuscript features a series of texts, mostly in Latin, compiled between the 12th and early 13th century at the request of an anonymous abbot of Kloster Neustift in the southern Tyrol. Already the object of many recordings, these refined songs are presented here in an absolutely new approach. This recording focuses on the amorous and, above all, moralizing poems, partly because of the topicality of their messages. Performed in universities and ecclesiastical circles throughout all of Europe, they are a sort of highly refined ‘clerical entertainment’, lacking neither irony nor tender nostalgia.

The Italian fifteenth century Laude still remain to this day a little-known and mysterious musical treasure. 2013 will mark the 600th anniversary of the birth of Saint Catherine of Bologna (1413), a woman of both deep theological insight and extraordinary, artistic talent, who founded and guided the first monastery of the Clarisse in Bologna in 1456. La Reverdie have discovered the repertory of laude sung by the Saint and her sisters, and have placed it in its original context: the expression of a mystic devotional practice which the saint herself vividly describes in her own devotional treatise «the Twelve Gardens».

Francesco Landini was the most famous Florentine Trecento composer, known for being a multi-instrumentalist, notably a virtuoso on the organ. As known, he lost his sight at the age of 7 but, despite his disability, he excelled in the study of music and all liberal arts. Might the condition of blindness have affected the poetic production of Landini? La Reverdie together with Christophe Deslignes, investigate this hypothesis, with a new project that presents both well-known masterpieces and pieces never recorded before, searching for signs that might be eventually impressed in the verses and the music of Magister Coecus by the loss of his sight.