Description
We are delighted to present our ninth album, Queen of Hearts (2024) which was released on Friday 28 June 2024 and is now available to order. 
About the CD
Over the past few years, it has been a joy to delve further into the rich tapestry of musical works that inspired our earlier album Josquin’s legacy. Choosing the repertoire for a recording is a particularly exciting challenge, requiring careful selection of a handful of pieces that weave together to create a compelling story. Josquin’s legacy explored the cross-currents of texts and the movement of ‘Oltremontani’ composers (from the Franco-Flemish School who came ‘over the Alps’ to northern Italy) as they travelled around Renaissance Europe. As we developed our concert programmes for performance, a new thread emerged: music that connected the queenly courts of Europe. There are several fantastic and beautifully illuminated sources containing music written for these courts, and many of them are preserved in the United Kingdom. On this album, we explore music that venerates the Virgin Mary—the ‘regina caelorum’—and that memorializes her terrestrial counterparts, highlighting the interwoven lives of Anne of Brittany, Margaret of Austria, and—in England—Anne Boleyn and Mary Tudor. We feature works which build new upon old, in particular a number of motet-chansons where sacred Latin texts are presented alongside contemporary courtly concerns in the vernacular. Just as medieval Catholic liturgy appropriated the Song of Songs to venerate the Blessed Virgin Mary, motet-chansons allowed court composers to work Song of Songs texts into secular music for the court, blurring the distinction between heavenly and earthly queens. The concluding piece in our programme is the remarkable Ego flos campi by Clemens non Papa, composed for seven voices. Recording this work was a poignant moment for the ensemble, as it was the last track we recorded with our outgoing bass, Samuel Mitchell, who has been with us for seven years. It was wonderful to have Alasdair Austin with us to complete the line-up. We have thoroughly enjoyed putting together this collection, and our particular thanks go to Guy James for his work researching and preparing editions of the music. I hope we have captured something of the intrigue and excitement we feel when singing this repertoire, and look forward to how this programme might develop in the coming years. Owain Park © 2024
Tracklist
Sub tuum praesidium Antoine Brumel
Praeter rerum seriem Josquin des Prez
Plaine d’ennuy / Anima mea Loyset Compère
Mille regretz Josquin des Prez
Sicut lilium inter spinas Antoine Brumel
Secretz regretz Pierre de La Rue
Quis dabit oculis? Constanzo Festa
Prière pour Marie Owain Park
Du tout plongiet / Fors seulement Antoine Brumel
Ista est speciosa Antonius Divitis
Tota pulchra es Jean Mouton
Salve regina Jean L’héritier
Plaisir n’ai plus Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade
De tous regretz Jean Mouton
Fors seulement Antoine de Févin
Consommo la vita mia Johannes Prioris
Tous les regretz Nicolas Gombert
Ego flos campi a 7 Jacobus Clemens non Papa
Reviews
The Times 20 Best Classical Albums of 2024, Geoff Brown | December 2024
“Moments of the most tender beauty, delivered by seven male singers with an unflagging ensemble spirit. If listeners don’t go weak at the knees at the warmly immaculate opening chords, then I suggest a hospital visit”.
Presto Recordings of the Year – Finalist 2024
American Record Guide | November/December 2024
“It is thoroughly researched … The repertoire is thoughtfully chosen and cogently explained. It is also beautifully performed, with the ensemble’s characteristic warm sound bringing the music fully to life. … The voices are well balanced … The dark bass voices supply a sonorous foundation. … Overall, Queen of Hearts engages the listener both intellectually and artistically.”
BBC Music Magazine, Kate Bolton-Prociutti | September 2024
★★★★★ Performance | ★★★★★ Recording
“The poignant theme of “regretz” in its various manifestations – sorrow, remorse, grief or lamentation – pervades this new recording by British vocal ensemble The Gesualdo Six … Throughout, The Gesualdo Six offer up introspective and expressive readings … it is impossible to find flaw with the ensemble’s matchless singing.”
SWR Culture, Doris Blaich | August 2024
“The Gesualdo Six [is] an impressive boy band of six young singers, each individually endowed with a fantastic voice. Collectively they are simply stunningly good-the voices blend perfectly, smooth high notes, striking low notes, sparkling clean intonation and vocal colouring; this ensemble sings with a wonderful flow, striking just the right balance between tension and calm that is so important to Renaissance music. The albums by the Gesualdo Six are always put together with taste and a great knowledge of the repertoire, often with contemporary pieces between the Renaissance works, which makes for exciting new listening perspectives – here the composer Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade has contributed a new composition, as has the ensemble leader Owain Park, who also sings bass in the ensemble.”
Rondo, Guido Fisher | August 2024 ★★★★★
“The six singers regularly succeed in creating an organic sound bridge between yesterday and today through commissioned compositions. This is also the case on the ninth album ‘Queen Of Hearts’, which sings of the Virgin Mary and earthly queens such as Margaret of Austria, Anne Boleyn and Mary Tudor in motets and chansons. Sacred and secular masterpieces have been selected not only from the pens of Franco-Flemish greats such as Antoine Brumel, Nicolas Gombert and Jean Mouton. They include famous farewell and funeral songs such as Josquin des Prez’s ‘Mille regretz’ as well as trouvailles such as Antoine Févin’s ‘Fors seulement’. And an arc is drawn to the here and now with six-part prayers by Owain Park and Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, among others, which fit seamlessly into this programme with their magical pathos.”
Sequenza21, Christian Carey | August 2024
“As is their usual mode of operations, The Gesualdo Six present a well-researched and musically inspired program. The eminent musicologist Guy James prepared editions of the music sung on Queen of Hearts, making it a bespoke collection that reflects the most recent and respected editorial trends. … Queen of Hearts is both curated and performed with exquisite care. It is one of my favorites thus far of 2024.”
Gramophone, Iain Fenlon | August 2024
“[The group’s] strengths are on full display from the opening of the very first piece, Brumel’s Sub tuum praesidium, an effectively simple Marian prayer whose chordal opening shows off the finely integrated power of the perfectly matched lower voices to great effect. This darkly sonorous texture is at its best in some of the larger-scale pieces such as the well-known seven-voice Ego flos campi by Clemens non Papa, and above all in Josquin’s architecturally towering masterpiece Praeter rerum seriem. … All in all this is a treasure trove of works, some little known and rarely performed, in a wide variety of styles and vocal scorings spanning the first half of the 16th century. Beautifully sung and meticulously researched, it will generously repay repeated hearings.”
Limelight, Tony Way | August 2024
“Here, we are presented with an engrossing exploration of music associated with the greatest of all medieval queens, the Virgin Mary, as well as “regretz chansons” that grew out of the personal and political intrigues of four earthly queens: Margaret of Austria, Anne of Brittany, Anne Boleyn and Mary Tudor. … Sung with the group’s customary vocal finesse, we are treated to fine performances of some of Josquin’s most famous works including Mille regretz and Praeter rerum seriem. … By way of empathetic contrast, new works by Owain Park (Prière pour Marie) and Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade (Plaisir n’ai plus) both highlight the singers’ unwavering intonation and ability to integrate musical idioms of the past with the present. … Throughout, warm vocal blend and a sense of shared artistic intimacy underline the exquisitely plangent programming. … Such heart-rending singing would surely have moved even Carroll’s Queen of Hearts to spare a few heads.”
Open House Scotland, Paul Matheson | August 2024
“Listening to their new release, I was struck by the depth and breadth of The Gesualdo Six repertoire; their scholarly investigation of centuries-old music; and the empathetic emotional intelligence that informs their performance of the compositions they find in ancient manuscripts.”
YouWineMagazine, Alberto Valentino | June 2024
“An exciting and ideal sound journey with a thoughtful selection of songs distinguished by an intense imitative style and rigorous counterpoint. … Anna of Brittany, Margaret of Austria, Anne Boleyn and Mary Tudor, are the queens of “hearts” protagonists of an exciting sound journey dotted with the most beautiful regretz-chansons. … Queen of Hearts thus comes to trace, but above all to unite, the great and small stories in which music has served as a common thread, thanks to a deep study, which is a fundamental part of this project, of manuscripts that preserve prescriptions of sounds, rhythms and texts that are in fact the story of human lives, places, works, styles and forms. And it is precisely on these invaluable sources that the Gesualdo Six consciously want to induce us to reflect. … Good listening!”
