Petre

Don’t forget Early Music Day on March 21st! We will celebrate this year with digital premieres of two beautiful albums. Pedro Memelsdorff is a renowned musicologist who founded the ensemble Mala Punica. With them he intensively explored the music of the Italian Trecento during his partnership with Erato, leading to three albums we’ve gathered under the title Gothic Italy. These recordings include the complete motets of Ciconia, a Flemish composer who settled in Padua and was one of the most important figures of the ars subtilior. Then, the complete songs - mostly in French - by the very innovative Matteo da Perugia, one of the first ever composers to put instrumental recommendations in his scores. These are coupled with a Missa cantilena, a parody mass made up by Memelsdorff after sacred or adapted profane pieces from various Italian 15th-century codices, which is an absolute splendor!

This is one of the monuments of recorded music, a magnificent undertaking. Everything Moroney touches comes up sparkling; it is perfect in every detail: musical, academic, technical, you name it.
This disc received the 2000 Gramophone magazine award for "Best Early Music Recording."

Most of Ciconia’s eight surviving motets are dedicated to prominent Paduan and Venetian dignitaries of the time, including three bishops of Padua, a Venetian doge, and cardinal Francesco Zabarella, Ciconia’s main Paduan patron. They constitute a highly solemn repertory in which virtuoso singing hides and at the same time reveals complex and fascinating musical structures. Sidus preclarum presents Ciconia's motets in a blend of four to six singers and four to five instrumentalists.

2019 will see the 500th commemoration of the death of one of the greatest geniuses humanity has produced: Leonardo da Vinci, scientist, inventor, painter – and musician. Doulce Mémoire, having devoted themselves to Renaissance music for the past 30 years, have decided to pay homage to Leonardo. Their founder-director, Denis Raisin Dadre, an eminent specialist in the music of the period and a great lover of pictorial art, has devised an original programme: ‘Rather than just make music from the time of Leonardo, I’ve taken my cue from the paintings themselves. I’ve worked on what could be the hidden music of these pictures, what musical pieces might be suggested by them….’ He chose around fifteen paintings, many of which are now in the Louvre: The Baptism of Christ, The Virgin of the Rocks, Portrait of Isabella d’Este, Portrait of an Unknown Woman (La belle ferronnière), Saint Anne, St John the Baptist… and of course La Gioconda. He then matched them with works by Jacob Obrecht (1457-1505), Josquin Desprez (1450-1521), laude for the Annunciation. There are also some frotolle, and songs to texts by Petrarch accompanied by the lira da braccio, an instrument Leonardo played himself. This recording comes with a handsome booklet, including reproductions of the pictures by Leonardo, some in detail, giving an intimate insight into them; there is also a text by Denis Raisin Dadre explaining his selection.

Active in Venice and Padua at the beginning of the 15th century, Johannes Ciconia was undoubtedly the most important composer of this transitional period. Born in Liège and trained in the principles of the French and Italian Ars Nova, he played a considerable role in the musical development that led little by little towards the Renaissance.