Merula: Complete Organ Music

Viccardi, Enrico

95252

Recorded earlier this year, here’s a small but distinguished volume in the growing Brilliant Classics organ library. The songs and chamber music of Tarquinio Merula (1595-1665) now place him in estimation as one of the most vital and original figures of North Italian musical life after Claudio Monteverdi, but too little attention has been paid to his organ music, which has had only one or two comprehensive recordings – though when one hears the Capriccio Cromatico, it’s easy to hear why Gustav Leonhardt and others might pick it out to illustrate the most inventive and challenging works of 16th-century organ music from whatever country. Indeed the piece, and several others like it here, sounds as though it could have been composed yesterday. The juxtaposition of keys is always striking, the movement between them unexpected and yet keenly plotted: Merula leaves the outright bizarre to Gesualdo.

CD

Muzyka klasyczna

Brilliant Classics

13-11-2019

5028421952529