Not much is known of the life of Giacomo Gorzanis, born around 1520, and died in 1579; he was almost certainly blind, probably from birth, judging from the note written in his Third Book for lute published in Venice in 1564 ("I, blind" and "I, deprived of light"); he was probably a very famous lutist, going by the note on his First Book of lute in 1562 lauding his"long experience over many years with the lute", and he probably also sang at the court of Archduke Charles II of Austria, if the note in his Second Book of Neapolitan songs of 1571 is to be believed: "the memory I retain, as your humble servant, and the true affection I bear for you." In short, it was a full life, in which Gorzanis would publish no less than five volumes of tablature for the lute between 1561 and 1575, and two books of Neapolitan songs in 1570 and 1571, which are precious glimpses of what is probably a much broader body of work, but of which now very little remains. The subjects taken on by the villanelles and other songs run from Petrarch and Ariosto to rather more daring stuff, even making allusions to forbidden love, the eternal subject matter of "popular" songs from the Renaissance to today. These pages, while still marked with a hefty dose of polyphony in the accompaniment, turn rather more towards the new style of melody, underpinned by a simple backcloth of chords – the ancestor of canzone napoletana, as it were, in which the line sung takes precedence over any other consideration. Pino de Vittorio (who sings but also plays the naker) is accompanied by Fabio Accurso and Bor Zuljan on lute and guitar, as well as Domen Marinčič on viole da gamba and percussion – including the dulce melos, a kind of hammered zither – played by Massimiliano Dragoni. © SM/Qobuz