Venite alla danza!

Venite alla danza! is early-music ensemble La Reverdie’s anthology of dance music spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, tracing how choreographic practice threaded through nearly every medieval musical genre — sacred and secular alike. Drawing on French formes fixes (Machaut’s virelai Moult sui de bonne heure nee, Du Fay’s rondeau Ce jour de l’an), Occitan dansas, instrumental estampies (La Seste Estampie Royal, Isabella), Italian ballate by Landini and Gherardello da Firenze, and devotional dance-laudi from Vatican and Cortona manuscripts, the program culminates in Guglielmo Ebreo’s Falla con misuras, a bassadanza built on the celebrated “Re di Spagna” tenor.

As director Claudia Caffagni’s liner notes explore, several pieces required careful musical reconstruction: texts like Sacchetti’s Benedetta sia la state survive only in words, so La Reverdie set them using the technique of contrafactum, borrowing melodies from closely related compositions by Landini and Gherardello da Firenze to recover a plausible original sound. Recorded at the Church of San Teonisto in Treviso — made possible through crowdfunding — on a striking array of reconstructed period instruments, the album makes the case that medieval dance music reached “almost all the poetic and musical genres” of its age, sacred and courtly alike.

La Reverdie