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Featured Album September 2025: EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble "Chromatic Renaissance"
The adventurous chromaticism of vocal music from the mid-1500s is celebrated on this month's Featured Album. EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble, perhaps best known for their work with new vocal music, turn the clock back to perform works by Orlando di Lasso, Cipriano de Rore and more, a repertoire they have been developing for the last eight years, on their colourful new album for the Winter & Winter label. Read on to find out more about this release...
Chromatic Renaissance
EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble (dir. James Weeks)
OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR SEPTEMBER 2025
Click here to order now!
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From the artist's press release:
The Chromatic Renaissance is a journey into the heart of a forgotten musical revolution. Beginning in 16th-century Italy, composer-theorists like Nicola Vicentino shattered the limits of conventional harmony, dividing the scale into 31 equal notes – not just the usual 12. These revolutionary ideas resulted in intricate microtonal madrigals and highly chromatic works that challenged musical boundaries and delighted ambitious princes and patrons alike.
These masterpieces paved the way for composers like Carlo Gesualdo, Cipriano de Rore, Luca Marenzio and Orlando di Lasso, whose works remain some of the most emotionally intense and sophisticated music of the era.
Since 2017, EXAUDI has been at the forefront of reviving this extraordinary music. To our knowledge, our residency at Aldeburgh Music in 2017 marked the first time in modern history that a vocal ensemble has sung Vicentino’s microtonal works unaccompanied. EXAUDI is still the only ensemble regularly exploring this incredible and fiendishly difficult music.
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Why The Early Music Shop loves "Chromatic Renaissance":
While one generally thinks of microtonal music in the Western tradition as being something of a twentieth-century phenomenon, it will come as little surprise to learn that the first flowering of musical chromaticism dates from the start of the sixteenth century and coincides with the rediscovery classical musical treatises from Ancient Greece. Indeed, the word ‘chromaticism’ derives from the Ancient Greek word for ‘colour’. While the sound of Ancient Greek music was lost to sixteenth-century composers and theorists, what they read in the available treatises discussed the three ‘genera’ of harmony: the Diatonic (corresponding to the modal system), the Chromatic (using the chromatic semitones) and the Enharmonic (using intervals smaller than semitones), and therefore the most alien of all. Music at the start of the sixteenth century barely used semitonal chromaticism yet alone the realms of microtones, but composers, armed with these treatises, began to explore ways in which they could be incorporated into their music, with the Este Court at Ferrara being an important centre for 100 years from the 1530s.
This new CD from the crack seven-voice ensemble EXAUDI offers an unbeatable programme of music from this period – the Chromatic Renaissance. Exploding with unexpected colours, harmonies and new forms, the results are daring and adventurous as boundaries are pushed to their limits by the virtuosic members of EXAUDI, who negotiate the twisting lines with precision and clarity – and impeccable intonation. The results are mesmerising and incredibly beautiful, the more so with repeated listening to this CD as one’s ears become accustomed to the level of chromaticism and microtonality. This music is incredibly difficult to sing but EXAUDI make it sound child’s play. Don’t be fooled by their sleight of voice.
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Chromatic Renaissance is available from The Early Music Shop online or in-store at our Snape Maltings showroom!