De Macque: The keyboard school at Gesualdo’s Court

Comprised of 25 tracks and featuring eight different composers, this release celebrates the best of Giovanni de Macque and his contemporaries in late16thcentury Naples. Each piece hails from the Luigi Rossi manuscript, a collection compiled in 1617 that survives to this day, giving us an extraordinary overview of the keyboard compositions written for the aristocrats who ruled the Kingdom of Naples at the time. Indeed, at a time when wealthy families were striving to retain their power and influence as the lower classes benefitted from a sharp economic upturn, the music of this period was highly complex, still exclusively aimed at the cultivated upper classes: extreme chromaticism as well as extensive use of polyphony and harmonic audacity are common traits of these works.On his arrival in Naples, De Macque made sure to curry favour with the right people, including Fabrizio Gesualdo, whose son Carlo became a famous composer in his own right. Works by both men, along with other renowned