Orlando di Lasso.(Brief Article)(Sound Recording Review)

Orlando di Lasso. Il canzoniere de Messer Francesco Petrarca. Huelgas-Ensemble/Paul Van Nevel. Harmonia Mundi HMC 901828, 2004.

Orlando di Lasso was one of many sixteenth-century composers to fall under the spell of the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch, whose collection of 366 poems (written, it is generally believed, in honor of Laura de Noves, wife of Hugo de Sade) inspired madrigalists across Europe. All of Petrarch's poems were eventually set to music by one composer or another, and Lasso himself set more than sixty of them over the course of his long madrigal writing career. Since it is difficult to imagine Lasso's settings receiving more sympathetic and technically assured interpretations than those presented here by the Huelgas-Ensemble under Paul Van Nevel, one can only hope that the group will eventually record all of them. For now, however, we must be satisfied ...