The first release of new material from Blue Heron since winning the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music, this two-disc set is the world-premiere recording of Cipriano de Rore’s landmark first book of madrigals for five voices. The set includes all twenty madrigals in De Rore’s 1542 print, as well as readings of the Italian poems (many of which are by Petrarch) by Alessandro Quarta.

De Rore is celebrated as an innovator who helped create the madrigal as it is known today, putting the music at the service of the text and inventing a new, dramatic, and expressive harmonic language. In this music, listeners will perceive a deep engagement with the text, an engagement matched by the singers of Blue Heron, who were led by both Scott Metcalfe and Alessandro Quarta in developing an appropriately rhetorical style of performance.

Musicologist Jessie Ann Owens (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, Davis) has shown that the book is a poetic and musical cycle that likely resulted from a collaboration between De Rore and the Venetian poet Giovanni Brevio (c. 1480-1560), who wrote the opening and closing poems of the set. The narrative structure is illustrated with “the colours of the modal system,” the madrigals being sequenced in modal order. Professor Owens’ research and conclusions are presented in extensive notes in the booklet.

Prof. Owens and Blue Heron won the 2015 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society, which provided stimulus funding for the project.

CD 1
1-2. Cantai mentre ch’i’ arsi del mio foco
3-4. Hor che ’l ciel et la terra e ’l vento tace
5-6. Poggiand’al ciel coll’ali del desio
7-8. Quand’io son tutto volto in quella parte
9-10. Solea lontana in sonno consolarme
11-12. Altiero sasso lo cui gioco spira
13-14. Strane rupi, aspri monti, alte tremanti
15-16. La vita fuge, et non s’arresta una hora
17-18. Tu piangi, e quella per chi fai tal pianto

CD 2
1-2. Il mal mi preme, et mi spaventa il peggio
3-4. Per mezz’i boschi inhospiti et selvaggi
5-6. Quanto più m’avicino al giorno extremo
7-8. Perseguendomi Amor al luogo usato
9-10. Chi vol veder quantunque pò natura
11-12. Quel sempre acerbo et honorato giorno
13-14. Far potess’io vendetta di colei
15-16. Amor, che vedi ogni pensiero aperto
17-18. Ben si conviene a voi
19-20. Hor che l’aria e la terra
21-22. Da quei bei lumi ond’io sempre sospiro

Blue Heron:
- Margot Rood (soprano)
- Martin Near (countertenor)
- Owen McIntosh (tenor)
- Jason McStoots (tenor)
- Sumner Thompson (tenor)
- Paul Guttry (bass)
- Alessandro Quarta (reader)
- Scott Metcalfe (director)