This three-disc box combines several recordings by the Concerto Italiano and leader Rinaldo Alessandrini, dating back to 1998; the result is a complete set of Monteverdi's madrigals of Book Eight. The word "madrigal" was fast losing its meaning by this late stage in Monteverdi's career, and the works contained here are of various kinds. One can ...
Domenico Scarlatti's Stabat Mater for 10 voices is a curious mix of throwback and one-of-a-kind creation entirely unlike anything else in his output. It has none of the proto-Classical language of his keyboard sonatas and seems to have been written as some kind of demonstration of the continuing relevance of the old polyphonic choral styles. And ...
Austerely agonized, excruciatingly ecstatic, and vocally virtuosic, this disc joining Alessandro Scarlatti's Dixit Dominus and Magnificat with five secular madrigals incarnates the notion of mannerism in music. Though self-consciously conservative, Scarlatti's music here is so expertly composed and so manifestly deeply felt that its extraordinary ...
L'Orfeo has become enough of a standard that it's no longer treated as a museum piece requiring reverential sobriety in its presentation, but even by modern standards, Naļve's recording must qualify as one of most uninhibited and vivacious on disc. This quality is not merely a matter of tempo, even though this version is overall somewhat faster ...
Rinaldo Alessandrini, founder and director of Concerto Italiano, is an advocate of an extreme flexibility of tempo in performing Monteverdi, and he cites the writings of the composer himself and his contemporaries on the use of sprezzatura (studied carelessness) in rhythmic vocal delivery. His performances have a wonderful naturalness and ...
Rinaldo Alessandrini's brilliantly realized recording of Monteverdi's Vespers is an intimate, slightly pared down version of the early Baroque masterpiece. Working in the warm acoustic of Rome's Palazzo Farnese, he employs just one singer per part, and eliminates instrumental doublings in the choral movements except where they are expressly ...
Rinaldo Alessandrini, founder and director of Concerto Italiano, is an advocate of an extreme flexibility of tempo in performing Monteverdi, and he cites the writings of the composer himself and his contemporaries on the use of sprezzatura (studied carelessness) in rhythmic vocal delivery. His performances have a wonderful naturalness and ...
Orlandus Lassus' Prophetiae Sibyllarum is the earliest known and weirdest of his 2,000 or so works, and it is isn't recorded very often. Although the first modern edition of Prophetiae Sibyllarum appeared as early as 1937, it was absent from record until Miroslav Venhoda and the Prague Madrigal Singers recorded it in Paris in 1963. In the four ...
Guillaume Dufay left posterity with an extraordinarily large and varied output, but did not supply any information as to the proper pace and mode of expression in such corpus; it is rather like leaving behind a unique model car with no instructions on how to drive it. A skilled driver with some knowledge of mechanics can figure out how to get it ...
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