Landini / Kern - Omaggio a Francesco - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Landini / Currentes - Altera Luce [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/12/2018

The CD is dedicated to the figure of Florentine Francesco Landini, composer, organist, poet, cantor and organ-maker. He was teh greatest representative of the musical style known as Ars nova, born in France in the first half of the XIV century and thence propagated throughout central and northern Italy, especially Milan, Verona and Florence. All the pieces in the program are contrafacta, that is they have a sacred text different from the original secular one. Such a technique of substitution is very old and was used from the XII century on. While listening to the varied pieces of the CD we may immerse our fantasy into the atmosphere of medieval Florence, where ideally a minstrel begins to pal in the street, almost improvising, while inside an oratorio some learned musicians are singing an abstract and quite sophisticated song.

Francesco Landini was the most famous Florentine Trecento composer, known for being a multi-instrumentalist, most notably a virtuoso on the organ. As known, he lost his sight at the age of 7 but, despite his disability, he excelled in the study of music and all liberal arts. Might the condition of blindness have affected the poetic production of Landini? LaReverdie together with Christophe Deslignes, investigates this hypothesis, with a new project that presents both well known masterpieces and pieces never recorded before, searching signs that might be eventually impressed in the verses and the music of Magister Coecus by the loss of his sight. The reference to the eyes from literary topos becomes in many Landini's texts a melancholic poetic expedient to express the distance, the absence or the loss of the beloved woman, that only Inchthe heart's eyeInch (L'Occhio del Cor) is able to imagine. A project which fills the recent recording void on a fundamental author at the sunset of the Middle Ages, reread through a perspective never explored until now. A passionate work on the strict bond between poetry and music, well explained by Davide Daolmi, is associated to a necessary musicological research about sources.