courtesy of Naxos of America
During both my undergraduate and graduate years as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there were almost no opportunities to encounter engaging performances of repertoire that pre-dated Johann Sebastian Bach. That was a time when membership in the Musical Heritage Society provided a generous number of recordings, and the ones originating in Europe tended to rule over any performances in the United States. Indeed, about the only American group that provided recordings was the New York Pro Musica; and in 1966 Everest Records released a seven-record set entitled New York Pro Musica: An Anthology of Their Greatest Works. After I acquired this anthology, I discovered that the contents did not include any useful booklet notes for any of the records. It was only after I became an Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania that I began to dig up useful information sources to compensate for Everest’s negligent packaging, and that was because my office was in a building that was right next to the Music Department!
The one record in the collection that interested me when I first acquired the collection was an album entitled Festino, a cycle that constituted the third book of madrigals in five voices composed by Adriano Banchieri, which was published in Venice in 1605. It was only much later that I learned that the full title could not fit on a record label: Festino nella sera del giovedì grasso avanti cena (party on the evening of Shrove Tuesday before dinner). In other words the madrigals were to be sung as part of the last festive occasion prior to Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lenten solemnity. As might be expected, there was more than a little raucousness associated with Banchieri’s music and texts, the most obvious of which was the eleventh, entitled “Contrappunto bestiale alla mente” (bestial counterpoint for the mind). One did not need program notes to relish the imitations of barnyard sounds in the text of this madrigal.
Over the many years that followed, I lost touch with the music of Banchieri; and the Festino became a distant memory. Thus, when I learned that, at the beginning of this month, Tactus released an album of this music, it was impossible for me to resist adding it to the queue I maintain of recordings I plan to cover. To my surprise, there was much more to this album than a cycle of nineteen madrigals. The Dramatodia theatrical company, directed by Alberto Allegrezza, reconstructed an entire Shrove Tuesday feast, interleaving the madrigals with narrations of texts by Giulio Cesare Croce, while also leading both vocal and instrumental resources. As the advance material for this album (which can be found on its Amazon.com Web page) observes, the entire performance serves up “an irreverent and paradoxical triumph of hyperbole, satire, jokes, and double meanings.”
That said, I have to confess that I came away feeling that this was a package that would have been better served by video, preferably with subtitles. There is no doubt that Allegrezza captures the orgiastic spirit of the music; but, when it comes to interleaving the madrigals with Croce’s texts, a well-staged visual account would have been far superior to simply reading the texts being declaimed. Fortunately, Tactus created a Web page for a PDF of all of the texts, both sung and spoken, the only down-side being that it is only in Italian! However, if the creative team behind this album really wanted to do justice to the indulgent extremes of a pre-Lenten feast, a visual account would have had far more impact than an audio recording, on which the impact of the music rises high above the spoken interjections.
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