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)