Philippe Verdelot: Madrigals for a Tudor King

Alamire (Artist, Orchestra), Lynda Sayce (Artist, Performer), Philippe Verdelot (Composer), David Skinner (Conductor) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Lynda Sayce
• Orchestra: Alamire
• Conductor: David Skinner
• Composer: Philippe Verdelot
• Audio CD (November 1, 2007)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Obsidian
• ASIN: B000Z6Y4DI
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #339,779 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is the first complete recording of the 30 madrigals by Philippe Verdelot as preserved in the Newberry-Oscott partbooks (c1528), thought to have been assembled for Henry VIII. As such, it is self-recommending; that the performances are so good is merely the icing on the cake.

Verdelot (c1480-c1532), a Frenchman who worked in Venice, Rome and Florence, was one of the chief innovators in the realm of the Italian madrigal. Here, he sets poems by Machiavelli, Petrarch, Bonaccorsi and others in a manner that relies more on the contrasts between lightly-textured polyphony and declamatory chordal passages than on the sophisticated word-painting of a later generation.

The UK ensemble Alamire, directed by musicologist and performer David Skinner, is joined on this recording by lutenist/harpist Lynda Sayce. Together they present Verdelot s madrigals in a variety of ways: one-to-a-part; solo voice with lute or harp accompaniment; or purely instrumentally, after the tradition of making lute intabulations of vocal music at the time.

This proves to be a fruitful approach. The expansive imagery in Petrarch s canzona Italia mia benefits from the full sonority of Verdelot s five-part setting; by contrast, the use of solo mezzo and lute alone in the following setting of Lodovico Martelli s Con l angelico riso emphasises the more delicate language of smiles, kisses and tears. Elsewhere, as in Deh, quant è dolc amor, the solo lute versions allow the listener to mentally recite, and reflect on, the texts, which are printed in full. The booklet also contains excellent notes by Skinner himself.

WILLIAM YEOMAN
Goldberd (edition 51) --Goldberg

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Scholarship, Good Intentions..., October 5, 2008

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This review is from: Philippe Verdelot: Madrigals for a Tudor King (Audio CD)

... but not on a vocal par with ensembles like La Venexiana or Il Complesso Barocco, singing similar repertoire. Honestly, if I'd heard David Skinner's ensemble Alamire ten or fifteen years ago, I might have been thrilled by their understanding of the madrigal form, but the leadership in 'early music' has shifted away from England to France and Italy, and today this performance sounds academic. The singers, I suspect, are recruited from the choral ranks of Oxford and Cambridge. Skinner has been active at both universities.

Philippe Verdelot was a Frenchman who spent the central and most important years of his career in the early 16th Century in Italy, particularly in Florence. He is known to have been a close pal of Niccolo Macchiavelli. He is clearly an important link between the Parisian composers of madrigalesque chansons, Sermisy for instance, and the up-and-coming Italians of the next generation. In other words, the archetypal Italian madrigal of Marenzio/Gesualdo/Monteverdi/d'India had a French parentage.

All the madrigals on this CD come from a set of five part-books (open score didn't exist) prepared under Verdelot's supervision in Florence around 1526 and presented as a gift to the English King Henry VIII. The history of their survival in quite fascinating. From Henry's library, years later somehow they passed into the hands of Francis Tregian, a Catholic recusant who died in prison for his crime of conscience in 1619. Then, amazingly, four of the partbooks reappeared in the 19th Century, in the possession of a series of antiquarian book collectors. Bernard Quaritch, the last of the collectors, sold the four partbooks to the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1935; thus the set is now known as the Newberry Partbooks. However, the alto partbook was presumed lost forever, and a musicologist named Colin Slim attempted a re-composition of that missing part, which was published in 1972. The publication resulted in the discovery of the fifth partbook, which had never left England but had survived in the catholic community. It had been left to Oscott College in 1883 by one Francis Amherst, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Northampton. Professor Slim made transcriptions of the missing lines and published them in the magazine Early Music in 1978. The five partbooks are still lodged in separate libraries, but the music is widely available. This recording is the first ever to unite all 30 madrigals in one performance.