Altri Canti D’Amor – L’Estro D’Orfeo

   in Early Music Today (Feb, 2018)
‘Love … is the subject of this CD’: while the disc’s title (taken from Monteverdi’s eighth madrigal book) suggests that from the off, it comes as a slight surprise to learn that this is an entirely instrumental disc, and so we have to let our imaginations take over and conjure up the amorous goings-on without the help of sung texts.

Director Leonor de Lera’s nimble violin and Josué Meléndez’s silky-smooth cornetto – both instruments vaunted as the closest, expression-wise, to the human voice – soon make one forget the absence of a singer, and they are ably supported by violin, viola da gamba, chordophones and harpsichord in works by Marini, Merula, …