A nice little surprise for me here. By one of those absurd accidents I have never before heard The Newberry Consort of Chicago. They are excellent, and I must try to hear their other records as soon as possible. Directed by the versatile and immaculately musical Mary Springfels, they have the benefit of two wonderful and beautifully matched singers: Drew Minter, billed as a countertenor though showing a full control of a range that can go well into the tenor register and with unusually clear diction; and the mezzo Judith Malafronte who has equally fine diction but at the same time a wonderful range of articulation that enables her to point the elaborate lines of the Italian trecento with precision and excitement. Just listen to the glitter as she sings Jacopo da Bologna's very difficult Non al suo amante—a song particularly important in being the only known Petrarch setting actually from the fourteenth century. To hear how well these two singers work together, listen to them in any of the three Landini songs they do together. And to get a sense of the sheer infectious musicianship of the instrumentalists you could try any of those long, rambling trecento dances they do as an ensemble, such as Cominciamento di gioia, where they resist the extremes of virtuosity but more than compensate by the sheer musical intelligence of their playing.
Solazzo is the young hero of a sonnet sequence Il saporetto written by Simone Prodenzani in the second decade of the fifteenth century, perhaps in Orvieto. The poems name 95 pieces that Solazzo performs to entertain his hosts (of which a very large proportion can be identified from sources of the time), and they often describe how he performed them; it is a source of almost unparalleled information about the repertory of the time. So it makes a perfect framework for a recording, even if not all the pieces here are actually named by Prodenzani. (Perhaps The Newberry Consort can be persuaded to do some more Solazzo records?) There is a neatly informative note by Mary Springfels, and the often tricky Itallian texts are lucidly translated by Christopher Kleinhenz.'