Edition 6: Il Primo Libro Dei Madrigal

Volume 6 of this path-breaking series, the first to record every extant work by Girolamo Frescobaldi, focuses on the secular madrigals. These works (he wrote one book, and evidently hoped to write more) are no less innovatory than the keyboard works that so impressed and influenced J.S. Bach. The texts feature the usual parade of lovelord shepherds and sighing maidens. Love unrequited is the keynote, but Frescobaldi's musical response to the expressive affect is more charming than heart-rending: these are not the passionate and personal declarations of Monteverdi or Gesualdo. These madrigals were Frescobaldi's first published music, and therefore evidently music of which he felt justifiably proud. Their language is doubtless shaped by his education and service in the northern Italian cities of Ferrara and Mantua, which thanks to the patronage of families such as the famous Gonzagas was a cosmopolitan hotbed of artistic and creative endeavor. Frescobaldi met and became friends with Peter Philips, the noted English composer of madrigals who had settled in the Netherlands, and Philips's delicacy of imagination can be heard in this collection.