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Deutsche Grammophon
DG 4778764
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Reviewer: Iain
Fenlon
‘Lettere amorose’
From Monteverdi’s “Lettera amorosa” to Janáček’s Second String Quartet, love letters thread their way through the Western tradition.
Now the latest phenomenon in Baroque singing, Magdalena Kožená, has recorded a sequence of Italian 17th-century love songs. Her voice, familiar for its ability to migrate from Baroque intimacy to Mozart operas and beyond, is as mellifluous and pliable as ever, light and translucent in the upper reaches while brooding and dark in the lower ones. Although there is a decided preference here for pieces in which simple melodies are strung out over equally simple repeated bass formulas, these are occasionally leavened by more complex works including two stunning if little known songs by Sigismondo D’India, and Monteverdi’s “Si dolce è il tormento”. This emphasis shows off not only Kožená’s highly theatrical delivery, which involves a great deal of added extempore ornamentation (just occasionally smudged), but also the versatility of Private Musicke, which provides an imaginative and inventive accompaniment. Originally established as a viol consort, this ensemble has expanded over the years in order to explore a wider palette of responses to the thorny problem of adding instruments to scores which are often unspecific and imprecise. Here this involves not only guitar, harp, colascione (a rarely heard long-necked lute), and percussion including tambourine, drum, and bells, but highly “orchestrated” solutions, with frequent changes of instrumentation in the course of the piece. The results, sometimes pleasingly organic and convincing if not exactly “historically informed”, can also irritate as continuities are disturbed and the aesthetics of a later age intrude.
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