Il Cor Tristo sets old and new music side by side, the approach The Hilliard Ensemble made its own over four decades. At its heart is the first recording of Roger Marsh's Il Cor Tristo, written for the group, a setting of cantos 32 and 33 of Dante's Inferno. Its three parts frame Petrarch madrigals by Bernardo Pisano and Jacques Arcadelt, two sixteenth-century composers, and the passage between eras is close to seamless.
The singers are the ensemble's last line-up: countertenor David James, the only founding member still in the group, tenors Rogers Covey-Crump and Steven Harrold, and baritone Gordon Jones. The album was recorded in November 2012 at the Propstei St. Gerold in Austria, a favourite Hilliard venue, with Peter Laenger as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Paul Griffiths and Marsh wrote the liner notes. It came out as the ensemble marked its fortieth anniversary and entered its final year, before disbanding at the end of 2014.
Marsh, a British composer born in 1949, wrote the piece in 2008. His stated aim was "to keep Dante's words clear at all times", so a great deal of text passes quickly in chanted, declamatory chords from which single voices break out. Speech rhythms shape the lines, and in the second part the singing turns at moments into shouting. The third part, over twelve minutes long, closes the disc. Between them come six madrigals by Pisano (1490-1548), an early figure of Italian polyphony, and three by Arcadelt (c. 1507-1568), whose textures are brighter and more open.
Richard Morrison in The Times summed it up as "Grim words; haunting music; masterly performance." Kate Bolton gave the album four stars in BBC Music Magazine in 2014, praising the "urgent lucidity" of the singing and the apt rawness it gives the Dante. She found the reverberant sound a little churchy for secular works. In the American Record Guide Jack Sullivan admitted he had expected to return mainly to the madrigals, and was instead captivated by the whole album.
CD, ECM New Series 2346, first released on 15 November 2013, in a jewel case with a 28-page booklet inside an O-card sleeve.
