The Spanish online review Scherzo.es has awarded our album devoted to Pomponio Nenna’s First Book of Madrigals for Five Voices the title of Discos Excepcionales de junio de 2026. Thank you!!!
At the same time, still on Scherzo.es, we received a fine review, by Urko Sangroniz: Comet Musicke brilla en ‘Il primo libro de madrigali’ de Pomponio Nenna.
English version:
“Pomponio Nenna belonged to the madrigalist movement of southern Italy whose nerve centre was Naples. Like the rest of his southern contemporaries, he used chromaticism and expressive dissonance, marked emotion and the dramatic, in the service of musical rhetoric, drawing melodic lines to underline specific words or metaphors. Il primo libro de madrigali, published in Venice in 1582, shows the style and the resources just described in a nascent form, less evident than in his Quarto libro, the next one that has come down to us. This first contribution to the genre is dedicated to Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria and Count of Ruvo — also Nenna’s patron — and to the birth of his child Antonio. The laudatory character of the collection exalts Carafa’s virtues, as well as other feelings such as love, passion and joy. The fate of its dedicatee, whom Gesualdo murdered together with his own wife when he discovered the adulterous relationship they were having, would be far more dire. Imbued with the spirit and energy of these delightful compositions, as flowery and expressive as they are interesting in their development of the imitative style, the magnificent ensemble Comet Musicke demonstrates its individual and collective quality through a beautiful sound, very homogeneous and vigorous, in eloquent readings. The variety of accompaniments of the instrumental section, doubling or replacing the voices with coherence and always in relation to what the text expresses, is admirable. The string instruments bow, ‘pluck’ or strike the strings according to the affects to be expressed, at times interrupting their playing to increase the tension. The excellent instrumental interludes provided by the consort of vielles and viols da gamba, with works by Giovanni de Macque and Giovanni Maria Trabaci, surprise through their innovation.”
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