Silvestro di Ganassi

Beautifully performed, recorded and presented survey of 14th Century Court music.

Violist Marianne Muller follows up the critically acclaimed Marin Marais CD of 2007.

A must for early music fans.

Played according to Ganassi’s treatises by Pierre Boragno recorder, Marianne Muller viola, Massimo Moscardo luto, François Saint Yves organ & harpsichord.

The influence of the Book of the Courtier pushed the aristocracy of Europe to play musical instruments. “One should know how to play, to improvise with above all easiness for his friends or his court.” Sylvestro Ganassi, probrably trombonist in Venise, answered perfectly this social need with three treatises related to the art of improvisation and diminutions : Fontegara (1535), Regola Rubertina (1542), la Lettione seconda (1543).

Pierre Boragno has studied them. They are full of indications helping the improvisation process, the diminution of all popular tunes… Together with Marianne Muller, Massimo Moscardo and François Saint Yves, they applied these propositions of diminutions, appropriate them to put forward this fascinating program which gives the intimate and virtuose atmosphere of XVIth European Courts.

This recording was created for the Titian exhibitions which took place at the National Gallery in London and the Prado in Madrid.

For Titian music was most certainly the food of love. Musicians appear frequently in his paintings delicately, sensually holding or playing their instruments, often in the company of a naked Venus as in Venus and the Lute Player housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the paintings of Venus and the organ player in the Prado Museum, Madrid and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

Words were more important than music in the Italian 16th century and song was therefore a higher art form than instrumental music. Composers such as Cipriano da Rore who observed the natural speech rhythms were afforded the highest accolades.

Wordplay presents a collection of highly decorated vocal music in purely instrumental performance. In the two centuries that this repertoire covers the borrowing and reworking of the music of earlier composers was regarded as creative, original and even as an act of respect or homage.

The disc is structured around instrumental divisions on five famous songs of 16th century and one bass-dance tenor. These divisions are for recorder, for bass viol or for lute. In total 17 different instruments are used including three types of recorder, three types of lute, seven sizes of viol, and a chamber organ.

Wordplay is one of the first recordings made in York's newly opened National Centre for Early Music in the church of St Margaret, Walmgate.