Luogo e data di registrazione		-
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
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	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken - 6.42632 AZ - (1 LP) - LC 0366 - durata 40' 17" - (p) 1981 - Digital
	Edizione "Reference" CD		Tedec - 8.44008 ZS - (1 CD) - LC 3706 - durata 40' 17" - (c) 1988 - DDD
	Cover		"Musizierendes Kinderppar", Porzellan. Modell von J. J. Kaendler, Meißen um 1765. Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.

Orlando di Lasso (Lassus): Latin Motets, French Chansons, Italian Madrigals from rediscovered prints 1559-1588 The present collection contains compositions by Palestrina's greatest contemporary. after a varied youth in France, Italy and his native South Netherlands (now Belgium), Lassus spent close on 40 years in Munich at the court of Dukes Albrecht V and William V of Bavaria, where he rose to the position of director of court music and acquired world-wide fame. No other composer before or since has received such acclaim or was so widely published during his lifetime. And yet some of his finest works have until quite recently been either lost or only incompletely preserved. Since at that time no full scores existed apart from the so-called Choir Books, but only separate part books, many settings were available only in an isolated part, e. g. alto or bass, from which, as many earlier researchers discovered to their deep regret, reconstruction was impossible. The author of this introduction originally reported on missing parts which he had found in foreign libraries (vide Die Musikforschung, 1955, "Neue Lasso-Funde" - "New Lassus Discoveries"); he then produced complete scores of the realised settings (Orlando di Lasso, complete edition, new series commissioned by the Académie Royale de Belgique and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Vol. I, 1956). Since then he has been able to unearth additional part books from their hiding places, giving a detailed account of their discovery in the Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 1965. These publications and his monograph on Lassus (Kassel-Basel 1959, Bibliography, pp. 77 ff.), which fills in a few gaps, provide a musical repertoire; this record will give lovers of renaissance music a delightful sample which in many respects afford new insights into the works of this "princeps musicorum", as his contemporaries called him. The following works have not yet appeared in print: the reconstructed madrigal “Spent' è d’amor”, “Ma che morta’, “Ove d’altra montagna”, “Ben convenne”, “Solo n’andro” and “Al dolce suon”. They are put together from sparse fragments of part books dating from 1567 and 1569; in this process several editions were used to supplement one another. They provide magnificent madrigalian images of ecstatic poetry, taken partly from Petrarch’s “Canzoniere” and partly from texts by the humanist Minturno, one of the reformers of the Canzone; they have given rise to fascinating, detailed musical word-painting, the “imitazione delle parole”, something quite new in Lassus’ middle period in which, incidentally, he also set poems by the diplomat Manrique (the charming “Al dolce suon”). Side by side with this idealistic poetry we find “Bestia curvafia pulices”, a coarse Latin “Song of the flea”: a mockinge piece of a type which at that time found questionable favour. All the words start with the letter p and curse the “lazy, crooked vermin” in the manner of student tomfoolery. “Praesidium, Sara”, on the other hand, is grave; itis probably a wedding song, evoking “the winged gods of love within the breast”. “Gloria patri” and “Da pacem” are parts of the Catholic mass and similarly belong to the middle period of the “mature” Lassus, in which he used broad vocal lines and mighty sonorities. “Beati pauperes” with the second part is a moving setting of the Beatitudes, in which the peacemakers are promised great rewards in heaven. It is possible that the Catholic Lassus wrote it for the French Huguenots, who were experiencing great trials and tribulations, shortly before they were so cruelly massacred on St. Bartholomew’s Day. “Domine, quando veneris” is another solemn piece. In this new milieu, a drinking song “Lucescit jam o socii” with French and Latin words, containing frivolous phrases such as “Nunc bibamus non segniter - let us now drink not unindustriously” and strangely distorted bible texts, strikes one as very peculiar. No less interesting from the point of view of the history of civilisation is the French chanson “Voir est beaucoup”, starting with a solemn exhortation “To see is much, to keep quiet about it even more” and then pouring out its music in bold sweeps. In this way, this recording provides across section of widely differing types of setting, ranging from the profound devotion of a saintly community to the ironic middle-class Gesellschaftslied of a dying polyphony at the end of the renaissance. (In addition to the motets, chansons and madrigals that can be heard on this record for the first time in more than 400 years, those interested in the genre can discover, in the editor’s works already listed, information about the other settings which have been rescued from fragmentary part books and constitute a revival of a timehonoured art from. Wolfgang Boetticher (Translation: Lindsay Craig)