From Darkness Into Light, released on 1 November on Obsidian Records.
A happy 'coincidence'
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A highlight for 2019
Musica Secreta’s new CD From Darkness Into Light might not have happened had it not been for AWA. In October 2018, AWA invited the group to perform at an event to mark the unveiling of the newly restored Crucifixion of Suor Plautilla Nelli. Musica Secreta’s co-director, Professor Laurie Stras, arrived in Florence a day early so that she could spend some time with an obscure manuscript in the Florence’s National Library. On that visit, she made one of Renaissance musicology’s most significant discoveries in the 21st century: the complete Lamentations for Good Friday by the Franco-Flemish composer Antoine Brumel, an astonishing and unique setting that dramatizes the Passion of Christ through the Old Testament texts. Musica Secreta recorded the work in May 2019, pairing it with a selection of beautiful Lenten and Marian motets from another manuscript by the same copyist, which was compiled for a Florentine nunnery in 1560. Laurie and her co-director Deborah Roberts felt that it would be entirely fitting to have Nelli’s Mater dolorosa as the CD’s cover, combining the iconography of the Crucifixion with an image of the Blessed Virgin, since it was Nelli who led them to Brumel’s masterwork.