La Venexiana / Claudio Cavina CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI Selva Morale e Spirituale

Not for the first time in their illustrious career, Claudio Cavina and his Italian vocal and instrumental ensemble La Venexiana have just received a strong critical vote of approval for their artistry, with the announcement on Thursday September 25th that they have won a coveted Classic fM Gramophone Award. Claudio Cavina was on hand to collect the Baroque Vocal Award for 2008 (decided on by the specialist critics of the UK-based Gramophone magazine) at a ceremony held in London, UK for his and La Venexiana’s recording of the fabula in musica by Claudio Monteverdi, L’Orfeo.

In Gramophone’s original review of the recording (which merited L’Orfeo being marked out as an Editor’s Choice), Richard Lawrence commented that “Cavina’s wonderful account goes straight to the top of the list of recommended recordings. Do not miss it.”; a recommendation that was taken up by the also prestigious UK reviewing forum, the “Building a Library” feature on BBC Radio 3’s CD Review programme, which identified the Glossa recording as the Top Recommendation for the work.

Counter-tenor and conductor Cavina has assembled a strong cast of leading vocal specialists including Emanuela Galli, Mirko Guadagnini (in the title role), Marina De Liso, Cristina Calzolari, Matteo Bellotto and Josè Lo Monaco, accompanied by the period-instrument forces of La Venxiana for the recording released last year on the 400th anniversary of the first performance of L’Orfeo.

La Venexiana have long been fêted for their subtle mastery of their native Italian – musical as well as vocal – language: indeed, back in 2000 Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, again in Gramophone magazine, enthused about them in terms as, “This exquisitely modulated Italian ensemble is wonderfully discriminating, extracting the eloquence of the mercurial lines and unobtrusively seeking architectural sense behind the text.” – when commenting on La Venexiana’s recording of Gesualdo da Venosa’s Il quarto libro di madrigali. This Glossa recording was to win the Gramophone Award in 2001.

Although La Venexiana have recorded and performed madrigals by other leading early Italian composers – Luca Marenzio, Sigismondo d’India and Giaches de Wert among them – the secular music of Claudio Monteverdi has, to date, been the focal point of the group’s activities: madrigals from all nine books have been recorded in Glossa’s Monteverdi Edition. Now Cavina is preparing for imminent release on the label an extensive three CD collection of Monteverdi’s sacred music, drawn from the 1640 Selva morale e spirituale collection.

La Venexiana CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI Ottavo Libro dei Madrigali

What is a madrigal? An unsuspecting listener of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book would have trouble answering this question. The flagrant heterogeneousness of this collection tells us that for Monteverdi, the madrigal has gone from being a genre endowed with univocal traits to encompass a multitude of forms, whose objective nevertheless continues to be the representation of human passions through the link between oratione (the poetic text) and armonia (the music). We can say that Monteverdian madrigals make their transition from contemplation to beating pulse, from the look to the gesture, from sight to touch, in the Eighth Book. The collection hangs from a network of impossible balances. The traditional traits of the genre evaporate in what is precisely its last and most glorious celebration. An ambiguous terrain that, nevertheless, reveals itself as being full of possibilities and developments. The Madrigals of Love and War can appear as Monteverdi’s testament in this field, but also as an extraordinary range of proposals for the future. Even in the early 21st century, Monteverdi continues to speak to us with the force and immediacy ofa ‘contemporary’.

La Venexiana’s most eagerly anticipated recording, their rendering of the Eighth Book is here to stay as the definitive Italian version of what is Monteverdi’s most important publication together with L’Orfeo. Their forward-looking, suprisingly ‘modern’ vision of what key compositions such as the Ballo delle Ingrate, the Lamento della Ninfa or the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda should sound like is profoundly moving and will leave nobody cold. Definitely, this set will mark a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in the interpretation of Monteverdi’s Madrigali Guerrieri et Amorosi. (GLOSSA)

La Venexiana CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI Primo Libro dei Madrigali & Nono Libro dei Madrigali

In bringing together the First and Ninth Books of Madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi it is tempting to ask the question whether some common denominator exists which is capable of encircling the entire range of ideas expressed by this journey, the duration of which lasted for over half a century. Monteverdi himself offered a clue to this question in a letter dated December 1616, where he wrote: “How will I be able to imitate the conversing of the winds if they speak not? And across them, will I be able to stir the emotions?” It is precisely his passion for the written word which guided the composer all through his career. Themes such as the world, feelings, the entirety of life, are revealed in a constant stream of words that are sung, cried, whispered, hushed and dreamt. Their rhythm, sonority and colour represent, for Monteverdi, direct proof of the mobility of the emotions, the primary material on which the composer needs to work.

Published in 1587 in Venice by Angelo Gardano, the Madrigali a cinque voci… Libro primo acts as the departure point of an exploration which was to change the face of the genre over the following decades, voyaging towards new horizons in which not only music but the actual vision of the world itself was to become irrevocably altered.

The Monteverdian voyage with the madrigal concludes with a posthumous (albeit detachable) chapter. Published by Alessandro Vincenti in 1651, the Libro Nono was conceived without the involvement of the composer, who had died some eight years previously. The project was born from Vincenti’s desire to exploit the pull which the composer’s name was still exerting... (GLOSSA)