Hyperion Records

Other pieces eventually revised for the second Année include the three Petrarch Sonnets, the supplementary volume Venezia e Napoli and texts of Il penseroso and Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa which differ only slightly from the published texts. The piece which eventually came to open the volume—Sposalizio—is offered here in a complete earlier version (the manuscript shows signs of much revision, and a substantial part of the piece is still present and legible in an even earlier draft) which is at one point rather more harmonically adventurous than the published text, but elsewhere less rich in its part-writing.

from notes by Leslie Howard © 1998