The overall musical style of composer Morten Lauridsen has often been compared to earlier choral styles; his flair for fluid choral melody, his love of contrapuntal artifice from canon to cantus firmus, and his delight in close text-setting, all point to his inspirations in the music of the past. In his set of six "madrigali," or Six fire songs, his inspiration is even closer to the foreground. Both his Italian texts in this song cycle and his musical approach hearken back quite deliberately to the heyday of the Italian madrigal, the work of Arcadelt and Marenzio and Gesualdo and Monteverdi, the last two Lauridsen even cites in his own introduction to the cycle. It was an era of passionate Italian love poetry (Petrarch sonnets!) and over-the-top musical settings, rich in harmonic and textural contrasts and the most vivid musical gestures conceivable. This is the ethos from which spring Lauridsen's Six fire songs, songs of the flames of love and passion.

Each of the six movements of the cycle takes an Italian love text from this tradition (with flames somewhere present), and renders it in Lauridsen's more modern yet very palatable style with immense reverence for the text subtleties. The first movement, on a Petrarch text also set by Monteverdi, speaks of the burning desire of the lover deprived of the beautiful face of his beloved, mostly in fevered musical homophonic statements, but closing in a passionate choral whisper. The second movement contrasts a more somber musical mood, though dealing with a similar situation: the burning of unrequited and deprived (or merely delayed?) passion. Lauridsen's music is noticeably more tortured in harmonic dissonance (except for the punchline cadence to "death"). Verdelot had been the well-known predecessor for the third movement's text, which Lauridsen sets to a literally fiery set of Poulenc-like textures.

For the centerpiece of his cycle, Lauridsen turns to another Petrarch poem, "Io piango," set famously and passionately by Marenzio (among others). It is perhaps this movement that comes closest to the central madrigalian ideals of using harmonic shifts (subtle or not) to follow close readings of the local sense of each word of text! (See, for instance piango, fiera, Amore.) In the final two movements—a return to the eye-motif and a final flaming text both also set by Monteverdi—Lauridsen returns to both textual and musical gestures from the first two movements, to round the cycle in a properly classical arch form.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi