The Eighth Book of Madrigals, subdivided into a substantial series of vocal and instrumental partbooks, contains some of Monteverdi's greatest music. In this sumptuous collection the material is carefully arranged by category into madrigals of war, love and those for the stage, with a wide array of human passions and compositional styles. This is the first recording to present Book Eight in its original, uncut form, also incorporating instrumental sinfonias and dances by Biagio Marini to round off Monteverdi's design. In keeping with seventeenth-century practice, the madrigals are performed entirely by male voices, including a boy soprano in the role of Cupid.
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REVIEWS:
The quality of the performances is extremely high. Technical prowess is always in the service of the music, and Marco Longhini is not averse to pushing his all-male ensemble to extremes of slow or fast tempos or to special vocal effects. Another strength of this excellent interpretation is the size and scope of the instrumental forces. There are 9 players in the continuo group, a further 9 in a mostly string ensemble (including 2 recorders), and a viola da gamba quartet. This gives Marco Longhini a very wide palette to draw on for dramatic power, theatrical variety, and evocative effect.
– American Record Guide
As Longhini has pointed out in previous releases, the instruments to be used is largely left to the performers, and in the composer’s day would probably have depended on those available. In this series of discs he has opted for a ‘middle-of-the-road’ approach, so as not to become ornate, yet providing more that an obliging backdrop. In the vocal group there are, of course, no female voices in music of that period, so that much rests on the shoulders of the outstanding countertenor, Alessandro Carmignani. Yet again I will heap praise on the sonorous bass voice of Walter Testolin, his deep voice is an earthy delight. Solos permeate all of the madrigals, and when numerous voices are used, the Delitiae’s blend is pure joy. Longhini's approach throughout this series has that feel of dedication and authenticity, the music continually intriguing, immediately likeable, and, in every way, it has been a wonderful experience with this as its crowning glory. The engineers have once again played their part in the clarity of texture they have created. It is terribly sad that it is coming to an end, but there remains just one more book, the unfinished Ninth, that was published after the composers death.
Monteverdi: Vespro Della Beata Vergine / Halubek, Il Gusto Barocco-Stuttgarter Barockorchester
CPO
CD
$9.49$18.99Save 50%Oct 15, 2021
There are indeed many recordings of Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, but the special thing about this particular recording is that it was produced following the performances of a scenic interpretation with the Spanish stage director Calixto Bieito. What now follows is a musical exploration forming a sequel to scenic occupation with the Vespers. Since 2017 Il Gusto Barocco has been the guest ensemble for the four-part Monteverdi cycle initiated by opera director Albrecht Puhlmann at the Mannheim National Theater. From the musician’s perspective, the scenic exploration of music rooted in the liturgy does in fact clearly differ from a performance during a religious service or a non-scenic concert performance. During the time-intensive process prior to the staging of an opera, scenes, images, and figures gradually take shape. In each stage figure the quest is for an emotional truth from which her or his artistic nature, aesthetic character, and credibility result – and ultimately word and tone, in order to produce empathy and engage the public. Another important aspect of this recording is the great number of diminutions in all the instrumental and vocal parts, all of which were improvised at the particular moment. During the shared scenic preparation for the opera stage, the individual movements of the Marian Vespers obtained a definite emotional space in the dramaturgical sequence. Accordingly, sections and their basic characters were defined and invented at the particular moment for each performance and for this recording.
This DVD is accompanied by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen's audio recording of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 (COR16126). In the BBC documentary, actor and former chorister Simon Russell Beale invites us into the heart of the Vespers and the world of their creator. It is the story of a Renaissance Duke and the composer who worked for him - and how their volatile relationship would create one of the most revolutionary and beautiful collections of music ever published: The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610.
Monteverdi: Messa a quattro voci el Salmi of 1650 / Christophers, The Sixteen
Coro
CD
$10.49$20.99Save 50%Apr 06, 2018
Monteverdi’s sacred vocal compositions introduced the expression of powerful and personal emotions to the world of church music. While it took him a number of years to find fulfillment in his work, Monteverdi was a revered composer within his lifetime and his music is regarded as revolutionary, marking the change from the Renaissance style to that of the Baroque. This album includes some of the finest works from Monteverdi’s years as director of music at St Mark’s in Venice, published posthumously in 1650 as the ‘Messa a quattro voci et salmi.’ “Pure- and vintage- Monteverdi, starting with a Dixit Dominus and ending, grandly with a version of Beatus Vir, using material we know from the familiar one. Ideal consort singing.” (The Sunday Times) “As always with The Sixteen, we get superb tuning, balanced ensemble work and a lively pace.” (BBC Music Magazine)
Monteverdi: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria / Gardiner, English Baroque Soloists
SDG
CD
$19.49$38.99Save 50%Nov 09, 2018
Monteverdi’s great opera is a celebration of unwavering devotion, conveyed in some of the composer’s most poignant, heart-breaking music. After two brutal decades of war, the weary Ulysses is washed up on the rocky shore of his home island of Ithaca. There, he discovers the hordes of depraved admirers who have beseiged his faithful wife Penelope in his 20-year absence – and launches into battle to win back her love. Monteverdi’s opera is a celebration of unwavering devotion, conveyed in some of the composer’s most poignant, heartbreaking music. John Eliot Gardiner leads an exemplary cast of world-class singers alongside the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in this live recording from The National Forum of Music in Wroclaw, Poland – part of their critically acclaimed Monteverdi 450 tour in 2017.
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REVIEWS:
Faced with lots of recitative and practically no arias, singers and players abandon themselves to intense arioso, jazzy cross-rhythms between poetry and continuo, and take-no-prisoners dissonances. Furio Zanasi, Lucile Richardot, and Hana Blažiková bring a depth of acting almost without rival.
– BBC Music Magazine
Recitatives flicker and spark with detail. Instrumental textures are spare and speeds swift, and there’s a welcome sense of narrative drive. Text is king, but it’s the rhetoric of the English Baroque Soloists that really counts. Zanasi is a smooth, patrician Uliss. There are more classically beautiful accounts of Il ritorno d’Ulisse available, but perhaps none with quite so much life.
This substantial set dedicated to the vocal music of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) features the great cycle undertaken (to date) by Krijn Koetsveld and the singers of Le Nuove Musiche: all nine books of madrigals, the music in Monteverdi collections such as the Selva Morale e Spirituale (1641), the posthumous Messa a quattro voci ed salmi (1650), and the individual works by Monteverdi compiled in the collections of others, the so-called Fragments. To this is joined the cycle of operas directed by Sergio Vartolo and sung by casts of Italian early music specialists, including the first recording of the five-act version of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria.
These thoroughly researched, historically informed interpretations demonstrate Monteverdi’s pioneering and transformative role in the emergence and development of staged, dramatic vocal music. Also featured are the grand Vespers – sacred music in the Gregorian plainchant tradition but on an operatic scale – in a fantastic recording with fine Italian soloists and authentic period instruments including the early brass of La Pifarescha. Federico Bardazzi and Ensemble Felice make scrupulous interpretative decisions about the order of movements, interpolating the choral motets within the prescribed sequence of psalms to great effect. Finally, there are Monteverdi’s youthful three-part canzonettas, written when the composer was 17. They are rather simpler than the madrigals, both to sing and to appreciate, but their musical worth is amply demonstrated by the largely female voices of Armoniosoincanto joined by a mixed period-instrument ensemble of flutes, violas, theorbo and harpsichord. They impart just the right light-hearted mood and dramatic impact to the playful, folkloric secular strophic poetry.
CONTENTS:
Monteverdi: Il primo libro de madrigali, 1587
Monteverdi: Il secondo libro de madrigali, 1590
Monteverdi: Il terzo libro de madrigali, 1592
Monteverdi: Il quarto libro de madrigali, 1603
Monteverdi: Il quinto libro de madrigali, 1605
Monteverdi: Il sesto libro de madrigali, 1614
Monteverdi: Il settimo libro de madrigali, 1619 'Concerto'
Monteverdi: Il ottavo libro de madrigali, 1638 'Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi'
Monteverdi: Il nono libro de madrigali, 1651
Monteverdi: O ciechi il tanto affaticar, SV 252
Monteverdi: Voi ch'ascoltate
Monteverdi: È questa vita un lampo
Monteverdi: Spuntava il dì, SV 255
Monteverdi: Chi vol che m’innamori
Monteverdi: Confitebor tibi III alla francese, SV267
Monteverdi: Gloria a 7, SV 258
Monteverdi: Crucifixus, SV 259
Monteverdi: Pianto della Madonna 'Iam moriar, mi fili' (sopra il Lamento dell'Arianna), SV 288
Monteverdi: Et resurrexit, a quattro
Monteverdi: Et iterum
Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum in sancta Eius
Monteverdi: Salve Regina, SV 285
Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum
Monteverdi: Beatus vir (from Selva Morale e Spirituali)
Monteverdi: Sanctorum meritis (Primo)
Monteverdi: Dixit [Dominus] Primo
Monteverdi: Ab aeternum, SV 262
Monteverdi: Confitebor tibi Domine, SV266
Monteverdi: Memento Domine David
Monteverdi: Laudate pueri Primo
Monteverdi: Salve Regina, SV 284
Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum omnes gentes II
Monteverdi: Magnificat Primo
Monteverdi: Gloria (1641)
Monteverdi: Dixit Dominus secondo a8 SV 192
Monteverdi: Deus tuorum militum sors et corona
Monteverdi: Confitebor tibi, Domine
Monteverdi: Iste confessor
Monteverdi: Beatus vir (second setting)
Monteverdi: Ut queant laxis, hymnus sancti Joannis
Monteverdi: Laudate pueri (Secondo)
Monteverdi: Deus tuorum militum sors et corona
Monteverdi: Credidi propter quod locutus sum, SV 275
Monteverdi: Jubilet a voce sola in dialogo
Monteverdi: Magnificat (Secondo)
Monteverdi: Salve Regina
Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum
Monteverdi: Canzonette
Monteverdi: Vespro della beata Vergine (1610)
Monteverdi: Cantate Domino
Monteverdi: O beatae viae
Monteverdi: Currite populi
Monteverdi: Ego flos campi
Monteverdi: Venite, venite
Monteverdi: Christe, adoramus te
Monteverdi: O quam pulchra es
Monteverdi: Salve Regina
Monteverdi: Fuge, anima mea
Monteverdi: Sancta Maria
Monteverdi: Domine, ne il furore
Monteverdi: Ego dormio
Monteverdi: Ecce sacrum paratum
Monteverdi: Salve Regina
Monteverdi: O bone Jesu, o piissime Jesu
Monteverdi: En gratulemur hodie, SV 302
Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum omnes gentes
Monteverdi: Adoramus te, Christe
Monteverdi: Messa a 4 voci da Cappella (1650)
Monteverdi: Dixit [Dominus] Primo
Monteverdi: Confitebor tibi, Domine
Monteverdi: Nisi Dominus a 6, SV201
Monteverdi: Laudate pueri
Monteverdi: Laetatus sum
Monteverdi: Lauda Jerusalem a 3, SV202
Monteverdi: Beatus vir (from Selva Morale e Spirituali)
Monteverdi: Magnificat Primo
Monteverdi: Missa 'In illo tempore' (1610)
Monteverdi: Dixit Dominus II
Monteverdi: Confitebor tibi Domine II, SV194
Monteverdi: Nisi Dominus a 6, SV201
Monteverdi: Laudate Dominum, SV197a
Monteverdi: Laetatus sum
Monteverdi: Laetaniae della Beata Vergine a 6 voci
Monteverdi: 7th Book of Madrigals / Alessandrini, Concerto Italiano
Naïve
CD
$10.99$21.99Save 50%Jan 06, 2023
With this recording of Book VII of Claudio Monteverdi’s madrigals (1619, Venice), Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano devote themselves to a love theme with a very pastoral edge the composer particularly savored. The Italian harpsichordist and conductor once again offers us a collection of Monteverdi madrigals of the highest quality, in which the poems not only lead the singing, but also determine the arrangement of the madrigals by poet. Inspired by “the hitherto unpublished stamp of a literary intention” indicated by the composer at the start of the collection, Rinaldo Alessandrini and his ensemble, accustomed to enlightening dramatics, offer a sparkling polyphony varying from one to six voices, in a wide range of pitches.
REVIEWS:
Claudio Monteverdi’s Seventh Book of Madrigals have been recorded well by several early music groups, but one expects superior readings from harpsichordist Rinaldo Alessandrini and his vocal-instrumental ensemble Concerto Italiano, and indeed, one gets them here. He presents the madrigals not in the order in which they were published, instead grouping the texted pieces by poet. This points to the stylistic features an audience of Monteverdi’s time would have been interested in, and Alessandrini supports these features with readings that differentiate the pieces sharply from one another. This is an ideal recording of music by the later Monteverdi.
-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)
This is Book 7, but not as you know it. A must-read booklet essay by Alessandrini himself frames the new recording as a philosophical and dramatic undertaking rather than an exercise in completism. This is opera without the stage – a riveting and incredibly stylish account of this vast and varied book of music.
Harmonies of Devotion is both an exploration of the Italian motet repertory of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and a celebration of the devotion to this sacred repertory displayed by English antiquarian collectors of the eighteenth century. Among the works recorded here for the first time are Giovanni Legrenzi's six-voice masterpiece Intret in conspectu tuo, which survives thanks to a copy made in London by Handel, a five-voice Crucifixus by Legrenzi's pupil Antonio Lotti, sent to London's newly formed Academy of Ancient Music, a grand Marian motet written for the Academy by Agostino Steffani, and music by Steffani's teacher Ercole Bernabei, again collected by members of London's antiquarian music clubs. The recording reveals lines of influence between teachers and pupils, and traces the lineage of the dramatic seconda prattica motet back to it's principal source and pioneer: Monteverdi.
One of the key German composers before Bach with over 500 surviving individual pieces, Heinrich Schütz mainly composed church music. Credited with bringing the Italian style to Germany, he continued its evolution from the Renaissance into the early Baroque. Despite living most of his long life in Germany, Schütz made two trips to Venice in his twenties. The first was between 1609 and 1613, during which he studied under Giovanni Gabrieli. The second trip occurred in the late 1620s, possibly to meet and study under Monteverdi. These visits significantly influenced Schütz’s music as he blended the ornate and theatrical Venetian style with the more subdued Lutheran tradition. This album explores his solo cantatas alongside examples of the brilliant and virtuosic Venetian-style instrumental music.
Monteverdi: Frammenti / Koetsveld, Le Nuove Musiche
Brilliant Classics
CD
$6.99$13.99Save 50%Sep 22, 2023
On this album, we find a wonderful collection of often short sacred works by Monteverdi, all published in compilations made by others. Parts of psalms and hymns of all descriptions make up the texts – and always in the style that we know so well from, among others, the concertos in the Vespro della Beata Vergine; the pieces from the Selva Morale e Spirituale (a collection by Monteverdi himself, containing only his own music); and the posthumous collection from 1650, Messa a quattro voci ed salmi.
The repertoire on this album derives from multiple sources and was probably included in the various collections because the compiler simply liked it. Besides the polyphonic, madrigal-like pieces such as Adoramus te, Christe adoramus te and Domine in furore, the often highly virtuosic duets and solo pieces stand out. Sometimes, for example in Salve o regina, the embellishments are written out, which in turn teaches us a lot about how Monteverdi envisioned them.
