What did the sacred music of the great madrigalists sound like? For Italian composers, with the possible exception of Gesualdo, the question is hard to answer because their music hasn't been performed much. This release begins to address that lack. Cipriano de Rore was one of the Flemish composers imported by Italy's rich and famous in the 16th century (the Este family for the most part), and they got their money's worth: he was one of the key innovators of the minimally contrapuntal, highly text-sensitive madrigal style ...
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What did the sacred music of the great madrigalists sound like? For Italian composers, with the possible exception of Gesualdo, the question is hard to answer because their music hasn't been performed much. This release begins to address that lack. Cipriano de Rore was one of the Flemish composers imported by Italy's rich and famous in the 16th century (the Este family for the most part), and they got their money's worth: he was one of the key innovators of the minimally contrapuntal, highly text-sensitive madrigal style that later got imported to Britain. The two masses and three motets recorded here are naturally more conservative in style; they are basically parody masses that make use of preexisting French chansons; one of them, the Missa a note negre (Black-Note Mass), draws on a chanson by Rore himself. Yet as the title suggests, it's no ordinary Renaissance mass; rather, it contains an unusual amount of declamatory text (the "black notes" are not keyboard keys but short note values), matching...
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