Meraviglia d'amore means the marvel of love, and in the graphics of this Accent label release, recorded in 2001 and released 16 years later, you do indeed get the promised love songs from 17th century Italy. Those songs are lovely, but they're not really the main attraction here, as suggested by the fact that the largest print in the graphics billing goes not to tenor Marco Beasley, but to the small ensemble Private Musicke, offering various combinations of Baroque guitar, archlute, theorbo, viola da gamba, and cello. They ...
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Meraviglia d'amore means the marvel of love, and in the graphics of this Accent label release, recorded in 2001 and released 16 years later, you do indeed get the promised love songs from 17th century Italy. Those songs are lovely, but they're not really the main attraction here, as suggested by the fact that the largest print in the graphics billing goes not to tenor Marco Beasley, but to the small ensemble Private Musicke, offering various combinations of Baroque guitar, archlute, theorbo, viola da gamba, and cello. They play instrumental pieces from various manuscripts by a group of Italian guitarist/composer/intabulators, most of whom are all but unknown and about whom very little information survives. This is, then, one of those rare recordings that's of a rather specialized nature but is still entirely listenable and even enchanting for the general listener. The repertory represented here as a whole is semi-popular: these aren't intricate polyphonic songs, but villanelles, canzonettas, and...
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