This album of English madrigals, many but not all of them familiar to fans of the genre, was originally recorded in 1979 and has been remastered for release by the American reissue specialist label Alto. It's what might be called second-generation madrigal singing, with the use of male countertenors instead of female altos, and with an attempt to delve a bit more deeply into a repertoire explored by scholarly investigators. The album does not, however, benefit from the efforts of singers trained to perform Renaissance music; the members of the
Pro Cantione Antiqua ensemble were students at the Royal College of Music who met and cultivated a mutual attraction for vocal genres of earlier eras. The sound is a bit too big and vibrato-filled, throwing the intonation off just slightly in heavily chromatic pieces like Giles Farnaby's Construe My Meaning (track 8), which take on an unpleasantly thick sound. This was, however, a recording that attracted a lot of general listeners to the English madrigal, and its virtues have traversed the three decades since its original release essentially intact. The basic melancholia of the music comes across, and there's none of the preciousness that marred so many madrigal performances of the period. No texts are given in the booklet, which is largely drawn from E.H. Fellowes' classic study of the madrigal, and even native English speakers may miss some of the words.