Senfl: Elend bringt Pein

It is appropriate that Heinrich Isaac and Ludwig feature prominently on this CD, as Isaac taught Senfl composition. In these songs, the tenor line is often based on a popular folk tune and the accompanying parts are rhythmically very tricky. The Dutch tenor Marcel Beekman performs baroque, classical, contemporary and operatic works.

At the beginning of the 16th century Nuremberg (“The spider in the web”) was a northern European centre in which many threads of international music life came together. Early on Nuremberg had established itself as a centre of book printing. The first printing-offices that occupied themselves seriously with the printing of music, however, were those of Hieronymus Formschneider and Johannes Petreius. Most of the pieces on this recording are taken from these collections of three-part music. They contain international repertoire, including old masterworks such as Caecox and Tandernaken by Alexander Agricola, but also arrangements of German folk songs and ballads, as well as French compositions and more recent Italian forms.