L'invention de l'antique

Album review

Opera was born, the inquirer into the genre's origins soon learns, when a group of Florentine experimenters trying to revive the power of ancient drama hit on a new kind of musical declamation. More obscure is the long history of such experiments over almost the entire Renaissance period, even though what was being reborn in the "Renaissance" was the culture of the ancient world. Daedalus ensemble director Roberto Festa notes in his booklet essay that the music sampled here "has escaped the attention of musicologists and interpreters." The program offers attempts by various mid-Renaissance composers -- French, German, and Flemish-Italian -- to adapt what they knew of the rules of classical poetry to the evolving art of polyphonic text-setting. A few of these pieces show up in historical anthologies; Claude Le Jeune's "musique mesurée" chansons and Cipriano de Rore's O sonno (which seems tangentially rather than directly related to the main theme) are known to those who paid attention in music history survey classes. But most of the music is new to the recorded repertory. The most unusual revelation here is that these metrical-musical experiments extended to sacred music as well as secular; in the Latin motets of the curiously named composer Petrus Tritonius (born around 1465 in what is now Bolzano, Italy) the repetitive rhythms lend the music an intriguing, chant-like quality. Tritonius' music, unknown today, was vigorously reprinted during the first half of the sixteenth century. Many of the secular pieces are less immediately compelling; the reason music history students doze off during Le Jeune and wake up again for Marenzio and Gesualdo is that the rhythmically freer Italian madrigal is simply more expressive. However, the performances and the presentation of the material reach the Alpha label's usual high standard, with a terrific essay on a Raphael painting of the Greek Muses, and spare, somewhat mysterious readings from Daedalus (with voices, viols, and flutes) that capture the fascination the ancients inspired in the Renaissance. This release can be safely recommended for those with a serious interest in the world of Renaissance ideas.

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