This release by the historical-instrument group
Le Concert Brisé (meaning the Broken Consort or consort with instruments from diverse families) originally appeared in 1997. The material remains unfamiliar, and the album was generally a good candidate for reissue. The presentation is not exactly user-friendly. The title "La barca d'amore" (The Boat of Love) comes from part of one of the dance pieces included and doesn't really give an indication of the flavor of the whole. What you get is sixteenth-century Italian virtuoso music for the Renaissance cornett, a tube-shaped (or snake-shaped) wind instrument that produces a sound somewhere between that of an oboe and a horn. It's difficult to play to begin with, and the performer here,
William Dongois, delved into treatises and uncovered some of the instrument's improvisatory traditions. The result is some very exciting playing, an example of which can be heard in the Sonata seconda ("La cesta"), track 13. All of the music involves considerable ornamentation, and
Dongois' notes don't make the procedures used totally clear. Much of his essay discusses the procedure known as division, a type of variation form that was partly left to the ingenuity of the player. The divisions here (not thus marked in the tracklist) are the pieces based on preexisting models, such as Jouissance vous donneray (track 4), with a model by Willaert elaborated by one G. dalla Casa. Other genres represented are sonatas, which at this point were instrumental analogues to the keyboard toccata, and dance pairs. All, according to
Dongois, were vigorously ornamented, although the style would differ in each case. It requires a little work to figure out what's going on in the music, but it's enjoyable and smoothly done, and the album remains an important step in rescuing Renaissance instrumental music from the dry bones of its notated versions.