La Morra – Splendor da ciel (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Here’s something fascinating: music from the 14th and early 15th centuries, lost for hundreds of years, has now been rediscovered thanks to some space-age technology. Because, in fact, the original manuscripts were never lost. In reality, the paper had been scrubbed and recycled or covered over with palimpsests because of the prohibitive price of parchment at the time. And so a whole body of Florentine works from the era of Petrarch, Boccacio, Dante and Machiavelli was erased to make room for 16th century poems. A careful examination of the San Lorenzo Palimpsest revealed that multi-spectral photography (anyone who knows what that is, raise your hand…) of the pages can render the underlying layer perfectly legible, and so now 111 pages of music from the 14th century can see the light of day. After six hundred years of multi-spectral silence, these pieces are interpreted here by the La Morra ensemble, which specialises in late medieval and Renaissance music with voice and instruments like the lute, vielle, clavicymbalum and recorder. There is an intensity of emotion in hearing these pieces which until now we never knew existed, written by composers of whom we know almost nothing such as Giovanni Mazzuoli and his son Piero, Paolo da Firenze or Jacopo da Bologna. Here they take centre stage.

Tracklist:
1-01. La Morra – Donna s’io ò errato (04:20)
1-02. Corina Marti – Douls m’est amer (02:11)
1-03. Doron Schleifer – Soiez liez (04:07)
1-04. Corina Marti – Dopo ch’i’ so (02:50)
1-05. Corina Marti – Poc’ hanno di mirar (03:30)
1-06. Anna Miklashevich – A’ piè del monte (02:21)
1-07. La Morra – Lasso dolente (07:31)
1-08. Doron Schleifer – Dicovi per certança (03:18)
1-09. Corina Marti – Sotto l’imperio (03:12)
1-10. Doron Schleifer – Splendor da ciel (06:08)
1-11. Corina Marti – Le souvenir de vous dame (01:57)
1-12. Doron Schleifer – A Febo Damn’e (05:02)
1-13. Doron Schleifer – Ihesu salvator / Quo vulneratus (01:36)
1-14. Doron Schleifer – Si nichil actuleris / In pretio pretium (02:03)
1-15. Anna Miklashevich – O tu, cara sciença mia, Musica (05:27)
1-16. La Morra – Uom ch’osa di veder (02:43)
1-17. La Morra – Amor mi stringe assai (05:16)