Jan DeGaetani - Early Music Recital
If you were to judge by her previous recorded oeuvre you might approach Jan DeGaetani’s singing of pre-baroque music with some trepidation. If so, you would be misguided, for this is no less than a stunning recording. Hers is a marvellously flexible voice, with a wide range of timbre, able to deliver the
Dowland’s sorrow doth indeed stay, Amarilli’s beauty is portrayed most delicately, and Donatus’s bird flies with graceful freedom. The six songs of Oswald von Wolkenstein are in themselves worth the price of the disc: the mischievousness of
DeGaetani’s is a remarkable voice, served by sensitive control, adaptable to all the stylistic variety herein, sweetly floating or forthright with a nasal tang, as appropriate, with an agile tongue and excellent pronunciation of ‘foreign’ languages. The instrumentalists provide enhancing and splendidly executed changes of backcloth. Here is artistry with which I have fallen in love – and probably would have done even if it had not been so very well recorded. Only one slight niggle: translations of the texts, not least the archaic German ones, would have been welcome even to those who are not entirely linguistically challenged.