This titillating repertory is best known today in the mildly acculturated form transmitted by Lassus, who was attracted to it while staying in Naples. It is easy to hear how the young man, with his ear for harmonic asperities (and taste for the salacious), would have found them very congenial. The pieces ‘transcribed’ by Lassus are all anonymous in the form given here, but named composers (most notably Gian Domenico da Nola) also contributed. But already I am revealing a bias that is surely inappropriate: the worth of this anthology does not reside in the music’s ‘ennoblement’ by association with a great composer. Yet while Lassus’s arrangements have already been recorded more than once with great distinction, it requires Opus 111’s long-term anthology of Neapolitan music for his originals to claim comparable representation on CD.
The wait has been worth it, for these performances have all the verve and lustiness one could wish for. The three singers, native Neapolitans themselves, sing in a deliberately ‘uncultured’ (indeed at times almost ugly) manner appropriate to the text’s off-colour disposition and the music’s rough-hewn directness. In the longer selections (such as Madonna, voi me fare) this can be slightly wearing, but clearly one needs to adjust one’s expectations of the music and transport oneself in imagination to some low dive in sixteenth-century Naples (if such a thing is possible) engulfed in pitchers of Vesuvian wine: in such surroundings an hour’s music would pass very quickly. Lute dances by Fabrizio Dentice give relief to the ear, and a few purely instrumental pieces like the Spagnoletta help complete the raucous merry-making. But enough of these poetic impressions.
This anthology conforms to the colourful, variegated plumage in which renaissance popular music is so often dressed; yet even if you don’t understand the words, there is a rough edge here that discourages easy listening, and will doubtless prevent a distinctive recording from ending up in some toe-tapping compilation or other. The accompanying notes are authoritative and detailed. In sum, a refreshingly odd project.'