Kanaris / Wise - Songs of Yearning - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Among the Spanish sources from the first third of the seventeenth century, the Cancionero de la Sablonara holds a very special place. It was prepared between 1625 and 1626 for a German noble, Wolfang Wilhelm, who held, among other titles of nobility, those of count palatine and duke of Neoburg and who had visited the court in Madrid between October 1624 and May 1625. This aristocratic music lover showed enthusiasm for the secular vocal music he heard at the court and, at the end of his trip, requested an anthology for his personal pleasure; it was compiled and copied with great care and beautiful calligraphy by Claudio de la Sablonara, main scripter-copyist-of the Royal Chapel. The collection contains seventy-five pieces, including Inchthe best songs that are sung in this court,Inch according to the compiler. This important source, preserved at Munich's Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, features poems in Spanish and Italian metric forms. There are fewer examples of the latter merely eight compositions written in liras [six-verse stanzas] and one sonnet. The Castilian forms, on the other hand, are represented by five romances [ballads] without a refrain, twenty-nine with a refrain, eighteen letrillas [lyrical poems], eleven romances with a lyrical poem at the end, two series of seguidillas, and several decimas [ten-verse stanzas].

Songs from Wizlav the Younger. The mïnnesinger Wizlav the Younger is the source of 17 of the melodies, with their accompanying lyrics, in the unique Jena song manuscript from around year 1320. The Norwegian grand old man of medieval music instruments, Sverre Jensen, has arranged the 17 pieces by Wizlav and recorded them together with his ensemble, Aurora Borealis. He has also reconstructed and built all the string instruments, making this a truly authentic performance. In addition to Sverre Jensen playing plucked instruments and hurdy-gurdy, the members of Aurora Borealis are Øyonn Groven Myhren (vocals), Anne Hytta (bowed instruments) and Tomas Nilsson (percussion and hammered dulcimer). Most of the musicians have roots in the Norwegian folk music tradition, as can be seen in their presentation of the Wizlav material.

These orchestral songs by the English composer Michael Csanyi-Wills - best known for his film music - all deal with the subject of loss. In Three Sogns Budapest, 1944 Csanyi-Wills uses documentation from his own family history to shadow the fat of Hungary's Jews under the Nazis. One of them, InchThe Last LetterInch, sets a text written by his great-grandmother before she disappeared. Mortality is an omnipresent theme in A.E. Houseman's Shropshire Lad poems Csanyi-Wills sets six songs, three for baritone and three for tenor. Elegy for Our Time sets an anguished lament by Jessica d'Este, sparked by death of her granddaughter in a car crash. Csanyi-Wills responds to the stimulus of these dark texts with music that is hauntingly lyrical and elegiac.