Founded in 1999 and directed since then by Geoffroy Jourdain, Les Cris de Paris have rapidly expanded their repertory to include not only the Italian Baroque – Monteverdi and Vivaldi have been the subject of individual recordings – but also Italian contemporary music. Like their earlier albums ‘Memento mori’ (Aparté) and ‘Melancholia’ (Harmonia Mundi, 10/18), the works on this new disc are connected by a number of threads. One is an interest in the unexpected, what Jordain in his booklet note calls ‘musical extravagances’ – pieces that push the madrigalian language to its limits while still remaining within the traditional parameters of the inherited stile antico.

Gesualdo, for too long incorrectly characterised as the ‘inventor’ of Wagnerian chromaticism avant la lettre, is at the centre of the phenomenon. Behind him stand Rore (represented on this recording with two versions of Calami sonum ferentes, one instrumental, the other purely vocal) and Nicola Vicentino, a composer and humanist with a strong interest in the music of classical Greece. Vicentino advocated the recovery of the three ancient Greek genera (the diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic), of which the last included a microtone, and in his determination to demonstrate the utility of adapting ancient practice for modern use, went on to compose a number of microtonal pieces. Two of them, Musica prisca caput and Madonna, il poco dolce, are given here in performances that bravely attempt to realise Vicentino’s vision. These quite extraordinary works provide Francesca Verunelli with the inspiration for a sequence of five completely new pieces which, in homage to the earlier composer, set out to disrupt the hegemony of equal temperament.

A second thread explores the work of a number of rarely heard composers including Hettore Della Marra, an aristocratic Neapolitan who composed music and played the lute, and Pompeo Nenna, also from Naples. Together with Scipione Lacorcia, all of these constitute a circle of musicians who were strongly influenced by Gesualdo. The singers of Les Cris de Paris are here combined in different arrangements throughout the album, to produce a richly resonant sound with a strong bass and bright, clear upper textures. The exquisite, often painful dissonances that are such an important feature of the style, the ‘strana armonia d’amore’ of the album’s title, are exploited to the full in careful readings that exploit every textual nuance. Discretion is used in the incorporation of soft instrumental improvisations in some pieces, and in the singers’ deployment of vibrato. The result is a fascinating journey through largely unknown territory that, while full of discoveries and surprises, brings rich rewards, particularly through repeated listening.