The madrigal is a polyphonic vocal music form that flourished during the Renaissance and early Baroque periods, renowned for its sophisticated interplay of poetry and melody. This secular genre, often unaccompanied and composed for four to six voices, is characterized by its emotional range, from light-hearted pastoral themes to intense expressions of love and loss. Madrigal composers like Claudio Monteverdi and Carlo Gesualdo were inventive with harmony and dissonance, illustrating text vividly through music—known as word painting. The form was immensely popular in Italy and England, where composers such as Thomas Morley and Orlando Gibbons contributed significantly to its corpus. The Hilliard Ensemble, among contemporary performers, have maintained the genre's presence through historically informed performances, highlighting its rich, textural intricacies and its significant role in the evolution of Western classical music.

Scenes from Childhood

Johann Sebastian Bach•

Alexandre Tansman•

Anton Webern•

Antonio Vivaldi•

Aram Khachaturian•

Bedřich Smetana•

Benjamin Britten•

Béla Bartók•

Camille Saint-Saëns•

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach•

Charles Gounod•

Claude Debussy•

Claudio Monteverdi•

César Franck•

Dmitri Shostakovich•

Edvard Grieg•

Enrique Granados•

Erik Satie•

Federico Mompou•

Felix Mendelssohn•

Ferruccio Busoni•

Francis Poulenc•

Franz Liszt•

Franz Schubert•

François Couperin•

Frédéric Chopin•

George Enescu•

George Frideric Handel•

Georges Bizet•

Gioachino Rossini•

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi•

Gustav Mahler•

Hector Berlioz•

Heitor Villa-Lobos•

Igor Stravinsky•

Jan Dismas Zelenka•

Johannes Brahms•

Joseph Haydn•

Leoš Janáček•

Ludwig van Beethoven•

Maurice Ravel•

Max Reger•

Modest Mussorgsky•

Olivier Messiaen•

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky•

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Album - 60 Tracks - Released December 26, 2024