Ensemble 1700 / Dorothee Oberlinger GIOVANNI BATTISTA BONONCINI Polifemo

POLIFEMO

Roberta Mameli / Luca Pianca ANIME AMANTI

A voice, a lute, a sigh. Nothing could be simpler and more immemorial. This expression of sentiments and emotions, of the intermittencies of the heart and the shadows of the soul, is of course as old as the world. Yet it was truly a reconquest of the Renaissance. With Caccini, the ‘new music’ at once found a miraculous melodist. He composed a Euridice, performed in 1602, two years after Jacopo Peri’s setting and five years before Monteverdi’s Orfeo. The Renaissance did not know opera, but long secreted that genre soon to be born. And it is brand-new opera that opens and closes this recording, through the voice of its first visionary, Claudio Monteverdi. His Lamento d’Arianna, the centrepiece of a lost work, expresses sorrow, regrets, revolt through the very music of the Italian language, here brought to white heat. The ‘new music’ spread throughout Italy: Merula in Cremona, Falconieri in Naples, and Barbara Strozzi, the most famous woman composer of the age, in Venice.

The Italian soprano Roberta Mameli is a great lover of this music, which she performs with an outstanding feeling for words and drama. Luca Pianca offers her his artistry and his great experience. Roberta Mameli is joining Alpha for several recordings, which will guide us towards other rarities and other periods. (LQM)

La Venexiana / Claudio Cavina FRANCESCO CAVALLI Artemisia

Where next for Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana after their exhilarating run of recordings of Monteverdi madrigals, operas and much more? One route is proving to be in the direction of Francesco Cavalli, the 17th century composer who spent much of his working life in Venice, starting off as a chorister in St Mark ’s Basilica when Monteverdi himself was in charge.

Although Cavalli has been known as a composer of Venetian seicento sacred music, it is his prolific contribution in the field of opera – where he became one of the leading figures involved in the development of commercial opera companies from the 1640s onwards – that has been receiving greater attention from artists in more recent times. And it is with a dramma per musica in Artemisia from the mid 1650s, with its tale of love, deceit and honour and the upholding of the virtues of the Venetian Republic (all this richly captured by the expressive style of Cavalli), that Cavina has chosen to contribute to that fresh look at Cavalli’s music on this new recording from Glossa.

Singers in the established style of La Venexiana, including the vocal star of ’Round M, Roberta Mameli and a recent finalist in the Handel Singing Competition in London in Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli (who takes the role of the love-torn Queen Artemisia, a character strong enough to drink her dead husband’s ashes...) give vent to this glorious display of Venetian operatic splendour. (GLOSSA)

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 Quinto Libro dei Madrigali

While La Venexiana are still on tour taking their successful Monteverdi L’Orfeo half way around the world and are also getting ready to make new recordings of great importance for Glossa, we here are in the process of completing a collection which has already become an undeniable reference point in this field: the Monteverdi Edition, which covers the entirety of the madrigals, composed by Claudio Monteverdi during the course of his life and published in nine books, the last of them being posthumous. Right now, it is the turn of the Fifth Book to be issued, while in a few months time we willrelease the two final remaining volumes.

According to Stefano Russomanno in his as everexcellent notes for this collection, “Monteverdi’s Fifth Book of Madrigals is a pivotal work. From its height it is possible to survey in a single glance the history of the madrigal, its previous and subsequent stages. On the one hand, the new collection replicates the miraculous poetic balance of the Third Book; on the other, it presses ahead even more radically along the novel lines presented in the Fourth Book. [...] Even more striking and emblematic of the new era is the presence of the basso continuo, which is mandatory in the last six madrigals of the Fifth Book and optional in the rest. [...] The door leading to drama and the representative style was now open. Monteverdi would not be long in crossing it: two years later, L’Orfeo would come to light.” And there is nobody better than La Venexiana to uncover for us the fascinating evolution of Italian music at one of its greatest moments... (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)

Roberta Mameli / La Venexiana / Claudio Cavina 'ROUND M - MONTEVERDI MEETS JAZZ

What happens when you bring the worlds of jazz and Monteverdi together? Is there a musical meeting-point where the two can exist? Claudio Cavina clearly has been believing in this possibility for some time (witness some very “modern” moments in his recent Glossa recordings of the Scherzi musicali and L’incoronazione di Poppea).

Yet this is not La Venexiana playing jazz: Cavina and his musicians do not change a note of the original scores. Instead they bring all their experience and expertise of playing Monteverdi’s madrigals, sacred music (the 1610 Vespers being their current performing focus) and operas to bear on a group of “ ballads” from the 17th century, but in the company of a select quartet of improvising jazz musicians on saxophone, accordion, double bass and drums and all with the warm, soaring story-telling vocal tones of Roberta Mameli shining through as the protagonist.

The clue lies in the album’s title, with the musicians tipping their hats and paying hommage to jazz standards. And Cavina says that within Monteverdi ’s music, “there is something modern, something new and innovatory which encourages one to dare, to go further.” Listen to the results... (GLOSSA)