The music of
Marc'Antonio Ingegneri
(ca. 1535-1592) is seldom performed; devoted Renaissance music fans may recognize him as
Claudio Monteverdi
's teacher. However, there is a good deal of interest in his works, and the (mixed-gender, adult)
Choir of Girton College, Cambridge
, and its director,
Gareth Wilson
, have done well to bring some of his music out of the shadows in a series of state-of-the-art recordings, of which this is the third. One may wonder whether one can hear hints of
Monteverdi
's stylistic revolutions in the music, and the answer, perhaps, is yes and no. On one hand, he was a member of the late Renaissance Counter-Revolution "Roman school," and he prized limpid polyphony, restraint, and clear text-setting. The
Missa Susanne un Jour
is a parody mass in which the model, ultimately a chanson by
Lassus
, is deeply woven into the texture in the classic Renaissance fashion, but much of
Ingegneri
's writing in his masses and motets is homophonic, and the big blocks of sound heard here must have made an impression on the young
. There are a few madrigals, unusually played by an organ. Why has
been forgotten? Perhaps because he came from out-of-the-way Cremona, not Rome or Venice, or perhaps because he was one of those "in-between" figures who doesn't fall into the usual music-historical categories. In any event, the youthful voices of the
Girton College Choir
add transparency and beauty, and the engineering at St. George's, Chesterton, North Cambridge, is top-notch. Listeners have been catching on to the choir's series, and this volume made classical best-seller charts in the spring of 2023. ~ James Manheim