VOYAGE EN ITALIE

This release paints a musical portrait of the young Guillaume Dufay and of the musical world he encountered when he traveled to Italy as a young man. Accordingly, it avoids the famous Dufay pieces such as the Missa Se la face ay pale, the Missa L'homme armé, or the motet Nuper rosarum flores; what you hear here is Dufay's style, which in many respects became the international style for much of the Renaissance era, coming together. The multinational group La Reverdie suggests that one aspect of this style, a freely melodic counterpoint, came from Italian sources, and crucially from the rise of Italian humanism, rather than from the Flemish and British styles usually emphasized in connection with Dufay. The album introduces several composers almost unknown to general listeners: Prepositus Brixiensis, Bartholomeus de Bononia, Bertrandus Ferraguti, and Antonius da Civitate. These composers are from an almost unknown generation following that of the first Flemish-Italian transplant, Johanne