Hungary's
Corvina Consort is a young group of fresh-voiced vocalists who have recorded mostly Hungarian music and French chansons. These short Palestrina pieces were a good choice -- recordings of them are not terribly common. This "prayer to the blessed Virgin" consists of a set of sacred madrigals, ordered by mode; 30 of the 32 pieces on the album are in Italian, the other two in Latin. English and Hungarian translations are provided for the anonymous texts, which are interesting in themselves. The music was not written for church use but was dedicated to a noblewoman. The texts are thoroughly poetic, based on parts of an older Italian liturgy but with vivid imagery that wouldn't be out of place in a secular madrigal -- Santo Altare, d'odor più veri e degni (track 16) refers to the altar as a "cinnamon tree burning with the truest and most worthy fragrance." Palestrina responds to this text with a musical language not too different from that of the secular madrigals he "blushed and grieved" to have written early in his career; his totalizing thinking is evident in the grand tonal design of the set, but not in the sweet and lively local details. The
Corvina Consort has a light, clear sound ideally suited to this repertory, with superior text intelligibility, and the engineering is a cut above earlier Renaissance releases from Hungaroton. The only small complaints center on the booklet, which veers from a general description of Palestrina's career to a discussion of the madrigals that will be too technical for readers not versed in modal theory; one also might have wanted to know where the recording was made. In all, this is a nice find for lovers of the Italian madrigal and especially for Palestrina fans who will be delighted to discover the composer's less sober side.