Thursday, May 28, 2015

Marco Dall’Aquila (1480 to 154?) - Music for Lute - Sandro Volta, Lute - Brilliant Classics 2014

I'm going to take a little break from Arnell posts; the reason being I'm not a fan of posting my entire collection of any composer consecutively, it's a bit tedious and needless to say listeners are free to choose to listen to any of my shares at any given time, and it's doubtful that many of you will sit there and have an "Arnell festival" for hours straight. Even great music 'overloads' if it's played in a marathon style, "too much of a good thing" ;)  It's more exciting for me to mix it up and I hope more interesting for all of you to have a level of variety coming your way. So, on to the music..

Little is known of Marco Dall’Aquila. His name appears sporadically in the letters of contemporaries, all of whom praise his talents as a lutenist and theoretician. Brilliant Classics has done a fine service by giving us an opportunity to listen to his music; it's extremely well-crafted, beautiful, and if one is a lover of lute or guitar music I think this release will be thrice as delightful. It is thought that Dall'Aquila was born in 1480 and died in 1544, and therefore his period of composition spanned two vastly different periods in the life of lute music: towards the end of the Middle Ages-at the end of the 1400s-the monodic use of the plectrum was the respected practice, whereas during the 1540s, the period of the instrument's greatest vogue, a complex polyphony and simultaneous use of an increased number of strings was the favoured approach. Dall'Aquila's music acts as a bridge between these two styles.




The repertoire on this disc contains Ricercars, Fantasias and a number of dance forms, conjuring up the atmosphere of the courts and palaces in which this stately and noble music must have resounded.
Why Brilliant Classics chose to offer only 49 minutes(!) of music I don't understand, there's plenty more music by Dall’Aquila out there. Oh well. 

Sandro Volta is a specialist of Italian Renaissance-Baroque lute music, and clearly, as you will hear,
one of the finest lutenists living today.

-I am keeping the files lossless as it's only 221mb altogether. Still, the last two tracks I am posting in a separate link (Zshare has a 200mb limit)

Enjoy ye explorers..

Dall'Aquila_Music_for_Lute-Tzadik.zip

http://www46.zippyshare.com/v/McoHxdpN/file.html

Dall'Aquila_Music_for_Lute(last_tracks)-Tzadik.zip

http://www87.zippyshare.com/v/bTYFJpqA/file.html

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks! I am following your blog, even though not commenting much lately. It is a good idea to "mix things up"! :) Arnell was a pretty new name for me though.

Please keep posting! There was a lot of great music in your recent shares, and not available anywhere else!

Piterets

Tzadik said...

Hi, Piterets, nice to hear from you. Great to hear Arnell was new for you; there's a wealth
of great British music on Dutton that's barely known, I will post all that I have from the label over time.
Mixing it up is good, it's the way to go in most areas of life I think!

TZ

Jaime said...

This is really beautiful-thank you for taking the time to share!!