On THE TOWER AND THE GARDEN, the multi-GRAMMY winning choir The Crossing and conductor Donald Nally ponder the fragility of the earth, the awe of nature, and the power of language to unite, or divide, society. Chicago's best-known early music ensemble The Newberry Consort exhilarates with VESPERS, a collection of dazzlingly original music for women’s voices. The composer? A mysterious early-17th-century Mexican named Juan de Lienas, whose style energetically oscillates between Renaissance and Baroque elements. Little is known about de Lienas beyond the manuscripts, which, much to the undeserved discredit of the poor composer, occasionally include unflattering personal remarks scrawled in the margins. Perhaps that these insults on his appearance and personality stemmed from mere envy, for the music captured by his hand presents such skill, wit and zest that it can still be enjoyed a full four centuries after its inception. Not an easy feat by any means, and certainly facilitated by a spectacular performance of The Newberry Consort under the direction of director and soprano Ellen Hargis. Since the music on VESPERS was originally composed for use in women's convents, the bass voice is either sung up the octave, or replaced by bassoon or viola da gamba. The result is graceful, airy, ethereal, otherworldly. Easy on the ears not only for lovers of early music, and for these: a veritable treat.

In the dark years of the Nazi-Fascist period, when the light of the end was still far off, Malipiero completed a long-awaited undertaking: an edition of the complete works of Claudio Monteverdi. Its last volume, the sixteenth, came out in 1942 at the height of the war. The edition contained the sacred production that the publisher Vincenti had assembled in the collection Messa a 4 voci et salmi (1650).

Quartetto Sincronie’s choice to include an arrangement of Monteverdi’s Mass, alternating the parts with Malipiero’s work, is yet another example of reinvention-creation that Malipiero would likely have appreciated. In the composers’ poetics, instruments are asked to sing as voices, and so the opposite—voices translated to instruments—is fitting. Philological rigor was, after all, foreign to Malipiero’s worldview. Instead, the composer spoke of his relationship with Monteverdi as a kind of psychic channeling: finding synchronicity within the synchrony of listening, which dissolves the distance of centuries. The Mass for Four Voices is thus split into parts throughout the record, but it remains possible to orient oneself. The cohesion is melodic: there’s a descending tetrachord G-F-E-D at the beginning of the Kyrie that returns in various guises (inverted, diminished, augmented), articulating the contrapuntal fabric of the different movements. The listener can thus follow this pathway, from the Gloria to the Agnus Dei, in a zigzag that turns Monteverdi the sacred “refrain” to Malipiero’s profane cycle of quartets.

Dublin native Aoife Ní Bhriain is one of her generation's most versatile and gifted violinists, a dazzling musician who commands both the classical world and her Irish traditional heritage. From across the Irish Sea and the west coast of Wales, harpist Catrin Finch has also built an impressive classical career and ventured into unchartered musical territory, most notably through her international award-winning collaborations. Double You, their debut album as a duo, features an exquisite collection of new compositions that draw inspiration from various genres, taking listeners on a captivating journey on the wings of the bees across the Irish Sea and inspired by the cultures of their home countries.

Polyphonic 14th-century Italian secular music seems to emerge out of nowhere in the history of music. Nevertheless, this tradition – which often goes by the name Ars Nova – fits seamlessly into the history of Italian culture. Our knowledge of it has been pieced together from relatively few sources, which nevertheless reveal three distinct phases. In its first phase, Italian Ars Nova spread out from universities, including those of Padua and Bologna, which had strong links with the dominant and contemporaneous French Ars Nova. In the second phase, the centre of 14th-century Italian polyphony seems to shift markedly to Florence. The final phase, which bridged the late 1300s and early 1400s, shows the influence of intense cultural exchange brought about by an international circulation of musicians and poets caused by the political instability of the papacy’s return from Avignon to Rome and the consequent heightened mobility among the various courts and their entourages.
This phase is reflected in such sources as the renowned Squarcialupi Codex. Compiled in Florence around 1415, it contains over 350 compositions (madrigals, ballate and cacce) and is the source of the majority of the tracks on this album. Francesco Landini (c.1325/35–1397) is represented by five of his 141 ballate and the virelai ‘Adiu, adiu dous dame’. Also from the Codex are one ballata by Andrea da Firenze (c.1350–1415) and two ballate and a caccia by Antonio ‘Zacara’ da Teramo (1355–1416). Three instrumental tracks complete the album, two of them from the ‘London’ Manuscript (British Library) compiled in Florence, probably in Medici circles. In addition to mostly polyphonic music by Landini and other Florentine composers, this tome features several anonymous instrumental works including the lively dances ‘Chominciamento di gioia’ and ‘Tre fontane’. The madrigal ‘Aquila altera’ has a different background entirely: the version presented here is the instrumental arrangement found in the Codex Faenza, a unique volume assembled in the early 15th century containing around 50 Italian and French polyphonic compositions for organ.

Bridge Records announces the release of Volume 21 the Complete Crumb Edition, a monumental recording project begun in 1982, and completed 42 years later with this final installment. The Grammy award-winning Crumb series documents the late American composer's complete catalog of works, spanning Crumb's seventy-five year compositional career. Project producer David Starobin writes that “the series benefited tremendously from George's participation in the recording and post-production of these documents.” This last volume includes compositions from the beginning, middle, and end of Crumb’s career and features the world premiere recording of the composer's penultimate composition, the percussion quintet Kronos-Kryptos (2020), performed by Ensemble 20/21 of the Curtis Institute of Music. The record also includes Crumb's second acknowledged composition, the Sonata for Solo Violoncello (1955), performed by cellist Timothy Eddy, as well as two performances of Crumb's piano solo, Processional (1983), played by pianists Gilbert Kalish (keyboard version) and Marcantonio Barone (alternate version with extended piano effects).