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Cantai mentre ch​’​i’ arsi del mio foco

from Cipriano de Rore: I madrigali a cinque voci by Blue Heron

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    The two discs come in a single 4-panel wallet-style format. There are no plastic CD trays, which makes for a greener (and more lightweight) package. The discs contain a world premiere recording of “I madrigali a cinque voci”, by Cipriano de Rore, including all 20 madrigals in the sequence found in the 1542 print, as well as readings of the poems in Italian by Alessandro Quarta. The booklet includes extensive notes by Musicologist Jessie Ann Owens (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, Davis), one of the world's leading experts on the composer, about De Rore and this book of madrigals, her research about the poets, and the evidence supporting her conclusion that the publication is a “song cycle”; notes by Scott Metcalfe about performance practice (including rhetorical delivery of text); and complete texts and translations.

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lyrics

Cantai mentre ch’i’ arsi del mio foco
La viva fiamma, ov’io morendo vissi,
Ben che quant’io cantai e quant’io scrissi
Di madonna e d’amor fu nulla o poco.
Ma se i begli occhi ond’il mio cor s’accese
Del lor chiaro divin almo splendore
Non m’havessero a torto fatto indegno,
Col canto havrei l’interno e grave ardore
A gl’orecchi di tal fatto palese
Che pietà fora ov’alberga ira e sdegno.
A gli amorosi strali fermo segno
Sarei, pieno di dolce aspro martiro
Ov’hora in libertà piango e sospiro.
Ahi, pace in cor d’amanti non ha loco!

Giovanni Brevio
Rime et prose volgari (Rome, 1545)

I sang while I burned from the living flame
of my fire, in which I, dying, lived,
although what I sang and what I wrote
of my lady and of love were nothing, or little.
But if the fair eyes whence my heart was ignited
had not wrongly found me unworthy
of their bright, divine, life-giving splendor,
with song I would have revealed
my inward grievous passion to her ears,
so that there might be pity where anger and disdain now dwell.
I would be a sure mark
for amorous arrows, full of sweet, bitter suffering
where now in freedom I weep and sigh.
Oh, peace has no place in the hearts of lovers!

Translation by Scott Metcalfe. Cf. translation by Martha Feldman.

credits

from Cipriano de Rore: I madrigali a cinque voci, released October 4, 2019
Recorded at the Church of the Redeemer, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Joel Gordon, engineering & mastering
Scott Metcalfe, producer
Eric Milnes & Joel Gordon, editing
Music edited by Scott Metcalfe from "I madrigali a cinque voci" (Venice: Scotto, 1542). Note entry by Holly Druckman.

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Blue Heron Boston, Massachusetts

Winner of the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music (the first non-European group to win the award), Blue Heron (Scott Metcalfe, dir.) has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s indispensables” and hailed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker for the “expressive intensity” of its interpretations. ... more

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