Consort Veneto & Giovanni Toffano - Musica a Padova al tempo di Alvise Cornaro (2012)

Although the execution is flawed, the idea of this disc is sound. Italy's Tactus label has consistently investigated both forgotten repertoires and new ways of presenting them, and they do both in this case. The most casual visitor to Italy will learn to organize the visual arts he or she encounters partly by the names of the patrons who commissioned them -- many paintings hang in the palaces for which they were originally intended, and in any case one is surrounded by tangible traces of the Medici family and the other kingpins of trade. Although noble patronage exerted just as much impact on music, performers have been slower to organize programs based on a place and time shaped by specific patrons. The patron in question here was the nobleman and writer (and subject of a famed Tintoretto portrait) Alvise Cornaro of Padua, a city neglected in comparison with its larger neighbor of Venice but one with a flourishing arts scene. Cornaro gathered poets to his villas as well as painters, and the music on this disc has much to tell about how music and text interacted in the early and middle parts of the sixteenth century. It is slightly conservative in taste for that era -- most of the pieces here were called frottole rather than madrigals. But they don't have the bouncy rhythms associated with the frottola in the few examples that are given in the music history books, and many are quite melodically sophisticated. The composers are a mix of Paduans and figures like Willaert who were of wider fame. Specialist libraries may want to get hold of this disc, but its appeal will likely be limited to them; the performances will take you back to the bad old days of early music, with instruments wandering indistinctly and a vocalist recorded in such a way that she sounds as though she's standing in the next room over. Texts are only in Italian, and the booklet is not very enlightening as to the relationship of specific pieces to the overall theme of the album. Nevertheless, the serious lover of Italian Renaissance secular genres will likely find new music here.