The recordings are typical DHM with superb clarity and dynamic range. The mastering to digital is excellent, and the booklet accompanying the series, while brief, is informative. The only unifying these here is baroque Italian composers, but it's extremely easy to fill a collection ten times this size with material from that category. What we end up with in these ten discs is a lovely mix of known and unknown, each pleasant to listen to and discover, and there's no listener fatigue at all working through these discs.
La Coscienza di Zeno is quickly becoming the new "enfant terrible" of Italian prog, 3 sensational albums into a career that just keeps giving vivid music that adheres to the classic elements that makes RPI so attractive to many , and puzzling to some others.
La Coscienza di Zeno is named after a well-known Italian novel, the title of which translates into English as ''Zeno's conscience''. The band initially played a modern style of progressive music that was influenced by the giants of UK prog rock. In fact, while they were working on their debut album they recorded a track for the Yes tribute project "Tales from the Edge"…
LA COSCIENZA DI ZENO (CDZ) is a modern Italian progressive band named after a well-known Italian novel, the title of which translates into English as "Zeno's conscience". The book is largely concerned with the paradoxes of human behaviour and is considered to be the first psychoanalytic novel…
The successor to Music in Europe at the time of the Renaissance, this second volume in our History of Early Music is devoted to the music of the first part of the Baroque period in Italy, from the Florentine Camerata and the first operas to the heirs of Monteverdi; it was at that time that the freedom of structure characteristic of the beginning of the 17th century began to give way to the first traces of formalism. This period covers almost an entire century, beginning with the performances of La Pellegrina mounted in Florence in 1589 and ending with the final operas of Francesco Cavalli in the early 1670s. The sacred and the profane mingled and met during this period, which also saw the birth of accompanied monody, opera and oratorio, virtuoso performance and the sonata; it is precisely this same mix that we see in the Nativity by Caravaggio that appears on the cover of this set. The musical expression of this Baroque aesthetic is the subject of Jérome Lejeune’s accompanying dissertation.