Chezzi, Andrea
Aemilia - Renaissance Keyboard Music From Castelarquato
The album AEmilia. Renaissance Keyboard Music from CastellArquato Manuscripts unveils the sound world of a small Emilian chapel in the High Renaissance, reconstructed from a corpus of keyboard intabulations preserved in the archive of the Collegiate Church of CastellArquato. Triptychs of pavana, saltarello and reprise, concise dances of popular extraction, ricercars by Cavazzoni, Jacopo da Fogliano, Villani, Veggio and Segni, together with intabulations after Willaert, Ferrabosco and Veggio, weave a dense continuum between sacred ritual and secular festivity. The timbre of a rare late sixteenth-century Italian virginal, attributed to Vido Trasuntino, restores to these pieces their original acoustic milieu and offers a finely etched cartography of the Po river Valley keyboard culture in its most intimate and sophisticated guise.