La Morra

La Morra – The Lion’s Ear (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:05:33 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ramée

In 1512, Giovanni di Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici (1475-1521) was the eldest surviving male member of the senior line of the celebrated Medici family of Florence, the eldest surviving son of the mythic Lorenzo “il Magnifico.” Giovanni had inherited his family’s refined interest in and zealous support of the arts: literature; painting, sculpture, and architecture; and music. But of all of these, Giovanni – perhaps due in part to his poor eyesight – favored music, for which his passion was legendary among contemporaries. The musical life of Leo’s court was unimaginably rich and vibrant, as innumerable eyewitness accounts confirm.

Our CD aims to bring that world acoustically to life, to revive the soundscape of the Leonine court and illustrate the range of practices typifying Leo’s own musical experiences. It is intended as a tribute to a rare and extraordinary patron of music (himself a composer and musician), who occupied that singular position at the very summit of the universal ecclesiastical hierarchy.

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La Morra – Splendor da ciel (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:39 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ramée

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.

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La Morra – Dulcedo (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:00:48 minutes | 2,44 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © OMF

Medieval Europeans often used various forms of the word ‘sweetness’ (Lat. dulcedo) to describe the beauty of a musical sound. ‘Sweet’ could apply to the sound of the human voice, but also to that of a musical instrument. When the ancestor of the ‘pianoforte’ was invented in the fifteenth century – some 250 years before Cristofori! –, it was baptized ‘sweet melody’ (Lat. dulce melos). Indeed, if there was a sound that medieval people were particularly fond of, it was that of plucked stringed instruments.

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La Morra – Mirabilia Musica. Echoes From Late Medieval Cracow (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:01:05 minutes | 2,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Ramée

The city of Cracow, until 1596 the political, commercial and cultural capital of Poland, rose to prominence in Central Europe in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under the rule of the Jagiellon dynasty. Although repertoire both performed and composed in Cracow exists from before to that period, it is the manuscripts from the first half of the fifteenth century that capture an impression of the city’s soundscape in a period when it was reportedly “gripped by the greatest enthusiasm” for music. On the one hand, they reveal an intense involvement with Italian and French art music, and on the other, rare glimpses of local musical production ranging from simple, often archaic-sounding polyphony to more complex works of Mikołaj Radomski, a mysterious Polish composer whose music is not known from other sources. The recorded programme is a musical panorama of a vibrant early fifteenth-century city in the East of Latin Europe which, six centuries later, still enchants with its medieval-renaissance aura.
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