Adrian Willaert - Josquin Desprez - Jean Mouton - Andreas de Silva - Johannes de la Fage - Costanzo Festa

Vivat Leo! Music for a Medici Pope

Cappella Pratensis & Joshua Rifkin

Label: Challenge Classics
Format: SACD hybrid
Barcode: 0608917236620

Catalog number: CC 72366
Releasedate: 29-10-10

Artistic Director Stratton Bull about the working together with guest conductor Joshua Rifkin: "Our partnership with Joshua Rifkin has perfectly met the objectives behind this decision (of working more with guest conductors): to make use of the expertise – and ears! – of a respected colleague with a deep understanding of our music, while at the same time offering that colleague an instrument to play with and exposing him or her to an approach to music-making that is at once extreme and (we hope) extremely appropriate." Vivat Leo! is the magnificent result of this cooperation.

Internationally renowned conductor, pianist, harpsichordist and scholar Joshua Rifkin joins together with Cappella Pratensis to make this extraordinary recording of Vivat Leo!
With their Saint Donation Mass of Obrecht, Cappella Pratensis earned a prestigious Diapason d'Or
With Vivat Leo! the vocal ensemble will again get high praise
In depth study of the ensemble together with and guest conductor Joshua Rifkin make sure that the performance is authentic

Godiamo ci il Papato, poichè Dio ci l’ha dato. ‘Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us’ – thus, according to a contemporary report, Giovanni de’ Medici, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, on becoming pope in March 1513. Enjoy it he did. In the eight years of his reign, Leo X, as Giovanni now became known, lived extravagantly, holding banquet after banquet, hunt after hunt, and sometimes parading a white elephant through Rome. His costly enthusiasms extracted their price, of course; within two years of taking the throne, he had turned a handsome surplus left him by his predecessor into a deficit, and before long he had to raise funds by such dubious tricks as selling indulgences on a grand scale – provoking what would eventually become the Reformation. Yet Leo did not exhaust the papal treasury on frivolous things alone. A man of extensive humanistic learning, he supported notable scholars and poets, including Pietro Bembo; commissioned major works from Raphael; and initiated significant building projects. Above all, Leo loved music. He knew it from the inside, possessing sufficient technical knowledge to compose in five voices. He staffed the papal choir – the body responsible for music at liturgical services – with some of the most eminent singers and composers of his day, and he maintained a private body of musicians that similarly included several highly prized singers, composers, and instrumentalists.

Much of the music heard at Leo’s court has vanished. We don’t know what his lutenists performed, nor can we retrieve the improvisations of his wind players. But we have an impressive record of the sophisticated polyphony sung around him: several manuscripts and printed books produced at his court or in its immediate orbit preserve works of both his own composers and others favoured by him and his musicians. A particularly vivid image of Leo’s musical world comes from the so-called Medici Codex, a collection of 53 motets possibly meant at first for Leo’s private use but ultimately presented to his nephew Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, as Lorenzo returned with his new bride, the French princess Madeleine de la Tour d’Au-vergne, to Italy in the late summer of 1518. With the exception of the first and last pieces, all the music on this recording comes from the Medici Codex. (source: linernotes written by Joshua Rifkin)

Gaude Felix Florentia