About this Artist

• Biography

Editorial Reviews

This disc, originally made in 1989 and led by early music pioneer Konrad Junghänel, stands up well and was a strong candidate for reissue. The Symphonia Angelica of the title was a printed madrigal collection issued by Hubert Waelrant, who was also a composer and included his own effort, "Tra romor tamburi." That piece, and all the others, are Italian madrigals, and the disc provides a fair cross-section of Italian madrigals as they became famous across Europe and in England, where they stimulated the creation of the works still taken up every year by high school choirs and glee clubs. The madrigals are mostly in four or five parts, and Junghänel varies his forces nicely; some are accompanied with viols or his own lute, while others are sung unaccompanied, and the group slightly shifts with each new work -- an eminently reasonable solution. The singers involved aren't virtuosi but blend nicely, with accurate intonation. The repertoire is the most attractive feature of the performance. Centered on romantic and even sexy poetry, the disc features composers -- Giovanni de Macque, Luca Marenzio, Philippe de Monte -- whose chromatic experiments are enshrined in music history books that assumed modernism as a virtue. But these composers wrote all kinds of music, and the lighter pieces heard here would be the ones that became popular -- the more experimental pieces were more in the nature of things to be shared with connoisseurs. One of those is indeed included: the composite "Mentre ti fui," with four composers each setting a single verse of the same poem. Texts are given in Italian and English; the last line of Macque's delightful "Bacciami vita mia" (Kiss me, life of mine) unfortunately comes out as "and then I shall leave my soul between your beautiful ips." The booklet also includes commentary in French and German (but not Italian); beyond the dry observation that "King Philip II of Spain was not exactly in Flanders for the cultural development of the country" it contains mostly specialist information. The average buyer, however, will get what the average buyer of the original book got in 1585 -- a pleasing collection of Italian madrigals. James Manheim, All Music Guide

Customer Reviews

• Listener Rating: