Amatemi ben mio I

This collection of works from the European Renaissance brings together five songs and madrigals to be sung in Italian, German, French and Dutch. Claudio Monteverdi’s Lasciatemi morire started life as part of an extended operatic aria from the now lost opera L’Arianna. In 1614, Monteverdi published an arrangement of ‘Arianna’s Lament’ as a four-section madrigal for five voices, of which this is the first. Luca Marenzio’s Amatemi ben mio, a setting of text by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, was first published in Il quarto libro delle villanelle a tre voci in 1587. It was his collection, Musica Transalpina, published a year later, that stimulated the proliferation of madrigal singing and composition in England. Pierre Passereau’s Il est bel et bon is an onomatopoeic chanson first published in 1534 that depicts two women gossiping about one of their husbands who is mocked for doing the household chores and feeding the chickens. The song’s bucolic character is typical of popular music in France and the Low Countries in the 1530s, which was often laced with double entendre and obscenity. Hans Leo Hassler’s Tanzen und springen, a work made famous by the King’s Singers 1983disc, Madrigal History Tour, is from the composer’s most renowned collection of lieder, Lustgarten neuer teutscher Gesäng Balletti, Galliarden und Intraden. Als ic u vinde by Hubert Waelrant is very much in the style of an Italian frottola (not dissimilar to the French chansons composed by Passereau). Waelrant, a member of the Franco-Flemish school, may have studied in Italy in his early years, as this secular gem and one of his most endearing works suggests.
A highly versatile series, SAM-Klang editions can can be combined with any existing orchestration published, as well as original SATB and divisi versions. Expertly arranged by Morten Schuldt-Jensen, former Gewandhaus Orchestra choral master and current Freiburg University professor, this series was designed to promote accessibility and music-sharing and takes its name from the three voice parts in the arrangements – Soprano, Alto and Low Voice (Men) – which, when combined with the Scandinavian and German words for ‘sound’, create the portmanteau ‘sound together’ or ‘harmony.’

"For the repertoire for choirs ‘with a lack of lower voices’, the music seeks to consolidate the forces a choir may have and produce close to a full-sounding performance of the chosen work as possible." (Music Teacher Magazine, 2023)