Description
Fire, movement, and transformation lie at the heart of this recording. Flamboyance immerses the listener in the vibrant musical world of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Europe's culture--like its flamboyant Gothic architecture--embraced colour, intensity, and exuberance. Spanning more than a century, from the early Italian Trecento to the dawn of the Burgundian age, this programme traces how polyphony spread "like wildfire" between north and south, sacred and secular, court and chapel. Motets, chansons, madrigals, dances, and sacred works by Landini, Ciconia, Du Fay, Binchois, and their contemporaries illustrate an ever-evolving repertoire in which devotion and passion, intellect and pomp coexist. Performed by the Sollazzo Ensemble, expanded to twenty singers and instrumentalists, this music is presented in a manner reminiscent of princely banquets and ceremonial contexts. Rather than treating the late Middle Ages as a distant historical epoch, the recording invites listeners to experience these sounds as a living, vibrant musical world.
