Coro e Orchestra Ghislieri / Giulio Prandi NICCOLÒ JOMMELLI Requiem

REQUIEM

 

La Compagnia del Madrigale CIPRIANO DE RORE Vieni, dolce Imeneo

With Vieni, dolce Imeneo, La Compagnia del Madrigale make another important halt on their compelling journey across the territory of Italian secular song with a disc devoted to one of the most significant, yet these days somewhat bypassed, composers: Cipriano de Rore. De Rore was a Fleming who enjoyed great success notably in the Italian courts of Ferrara and Parma – but with a prestige which extended up and across Europe. He composed in many genres, but it is the secular madrigal – recorded here – where his skill was most valued, for example in creating extended and expressive melodic lines coupled with innovatory pre-echoes of the seconda pratica so triumphantly expressed – albeit amidst great criticism – by Claudio Monteverdi.

Recordings – all also on Glossa – of madrigals by Marenzio, Gesualdo and Monteverdi have already demonstrated musical pleasures such as an uncommon vocal blend and delicacy, and a meticulous dynamic control exhibited by the richly experienced members of La Compagnia del Madrigale, and those delights are to be experienced with these 19 madrigals by Cipriano de Rore, composed late in his career.

With texts by Petrarch, Ariosto and assorted court poets for these madrigals, essay-writer Marco Bizzarini highlights one of the principal characteristic features of de Rore’s mastery when he points to the disc’s title track, Vieni, dolce Imeneo: the ideal union between poetry and music.

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)

La Compagnia del Madrigale CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI Il pianto della Madonna

With Il pianto della Madonna, a collection of spiritual compositions by Claudio Monteverdi, La Compagnia del Madrigale provide a stunning follow-up to their award-winning recording of the Fifth Book of madrigals by Luca Marenzio – both releases from Glossa. The singers of the ensemble have returned to their favoured Piedmontese recording location in Roletto to create a vivid sound picture of the desire in Monteverdi’s own time to bring the “heavenly harmony” of the composer’s secular works into the service of the religious domain (and that despite Post-Tridentine restrictions on such secular “intrusions”).

Here, for example, is presented the spiritual version of the celebrated Lamento d’Arianna from the lost opera Arianna – Il pianto della Madonna – and sung in a distinctive polyphonic reworking prepared especially for La Compagnia del Madrigale. Pastoral concerns in Monteverdi’s madrigals, such as in the Fourth and Fifth Books, make way for reflections on the Crucifixion or the Nativity through the new religious texts supplied by the likes of Angelo Grillo and Aquilino Coppini, which nonetheless fit the music more than aptly. Included also are some of Monteverdi’s own religious compositions, as published by Giulio Cesare Bianchi, and including the extensive Litaniae lauretanae.

In the booklet essay Marco Bizzarini brings his deep understanding of the interplay of words and music in Italy in Monteverdi’s time, underscoring the skill, experience and sheer musicality of La Compagnia del Madrigale. (GLOSSA)

Il pianto della Madonna.pdf

Allabastrina / La Pifarescha / Elena Sartori FRANCESCA CACCINI La liberazione di Ruggerio dall’isola di Alcina

With this production of Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggerio dall’isola di Alcina, directed by Elena Sartori, an important stepping-stone in the development of seventeenth-century opera receives a superb new recording from Glossa. For much of her career – Caccini was a composer, a virtuoso singer, a teacher, a poet and a multiinstrumentalist – she worked at the Medici court, and was commissioned by the grand duchess of Tuscany, Maria Maddalena of Austria, to write this commedia in musica for performance in Florence in 1625. Very probably this was the first opera composed by a woman, and its performance in Warsaw in 1628 stands as the first documented Italian opera known to have been staged outside the peninsula.

Caccini’s score, evoking not just the music of her father Giulio but that of Jacopo Peri and of the Monteverdi of Venice, is full of musical diversity and originality. The libretto of La liberazione (by Ferdinando Saracinelli, working from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic Orlando furioso) portrays the struggle between two sorceresses – one ‘good’, Melissa, the other ‘evil’, Alcina – over the young knight Ruggiero, who has been bewitched by Alcina.  

The singers recorded here for these roles are Gabriella Martellacci, Elena Biscuola and Mauro Borgioni, whilst other roles – in a score packed with vocal opportunities – are taken by Emanuela Galli, Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli and Raffaele Giordani. Elena Sartori, who directs the ensembles Allabastrina and La Pifarescha, also contributes an illuminating booklet essay placing Francesca Caccini in her musical and biographical context. (GLOSSA)