Lavish sounds of early modern Italy

Abstract

In the present time, when everything seems to have been discovered, researched and revisited, it seems difficult to find a ‘first’. Yet this batch of recordings presents six firsts for early modern Italian sacred vocal polyphonic music. A collection of representative mid-17th-century small-scale sacred monodies by Carlo Filago and Leonardo Leo’s responsories are recorded in their entirety for the first time. The first two albums of Giovanni Legrenzi’s collected liturgical music revisit the late 17th-century composer’s opus, in line with the performers’ goal to record his complete works. Similarly, another in a line of first recordings of Melchior Vulpius’s liturgical output is added to the project, slowly working towards the completion of this composer’s oeuvre on disc. Lastly, late 15th- and early 16th-century music from Italian convents reaches us for the first time. Performed by Italian ensemble Les Nations, Carlo Filago: Sacri concerti a voce sola, 1642 (Tactus tc 580610, issued 2022) is a first in the row of firsts: a first almost complete recording of the composer’s last collection, missing only two out of 16 original compositions. In the context of the rest of his opus—two collections of polyphonic motets (1611 and 1619) and a lost collection of Sacrae cantiones (1611)—this collection presents a genre typical of the period. Sacred monody was an effective and popular tool in devotion and was well known by the mid 17th century. In the liner notes, musicologist Mariarosa Pollastri points out that the collection is directly connected to a Polish nun Maria Felice Sbarasca (active in the convent of St Marco and St Andrea in Murano), as well as Filago’s afterword. There, he uncovers his dissatisfaction with ‘the modern way of singing and composing’, in which he ‘condemns decidedly the excesses of the virtuosi that sing in the church as if they were in a theatre’.