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 Settimo Libro dei Madrigali

In 1619 Monteverdi dedicated his Seventh Book of Madrigals to Catherine de’ Medici, Duchess of Mantua. He chooses a title which in itself is a declaration of intentions: Concerto. The concerto’s dimension implies a certain diversity, and in this sense the Seventh Book marks a turning-point. The new publication renounces the classic five-voice setting (that had monopolized the first six books) in favour of a very ample formal variety: madrigals for one, two, three, four and six voices are found side by side with “other song genres”, as the composer specifies on the frontispiece. In its extreme variety of accents, forms and settings (for the first time the instruments have a prominent role and are not limited to that of continuo), the Seventh Book forms a kind of imaginary theatre: stories which unfold and disappear, fragments of idylls, tragedies and even comedies, but of whose protagonists, temporal and spatial setting we are totally unaware. (GLOSSA)

La Venexiana CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI Sesto Libro dei Madrigali

With the ease and flair of the great masters, the members of La Venexiana once again reach a level entirely unattainable for other consorts, in a repertoire demanding the fullest identification of composer and performer. Within the Monteverdi Edition, it is time now for the Sixth Book, beginning with the well-known Lamento d'Arianna in its madrigal version, where a larger-than-life Rossana Bertini sets the tone for her companions in a stunning rendition.

The Sixth is a transitional book, where some of the great changes Monteverdi will establish in his Seventh Book can already be surmised. Its literary texts are full of direct and intertwined dialogues, as the third person gives way to the first, and description to representation. Instruments appear timidly, with a most subtle Fabio Bonizzoni contributing his personal touch of magic to pieces that tend to shape up as true miniature dramas. (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 Quarto Libro dei Madrigali

Nowadays, to speak about the Italian madrigal is to speak about La Venexiana. It also means, of course, speaking of Monteverdi. What better combination then, than La Venexiana singing madrigals by Monteverdi? Assuming our responsibility as a specialized label, we have decided to create a new collection, the Monteverdi Edition, in which we will present the complete madrigalsof the composer from Cremona in 2-3 annual volumes.

Mantua and Ferrara, the two poles between which the Fourth Book, inaugural disc of this collection, travels, are also emblematic of two distinct yet complementary identities: not geographical alone, but lifestyles and ways of questioning the reality of feelings as well. As never before, the result of Monteverdi’s madrigals is an agile dialectic of metamorphosing gestures, techniques, forms and colours. In this musical journey between Mantua and Ferrara, the equilibrium sought is not static. Rather, it is subject to constant variation and recomposing.

A little farther on, monody and the basso continuo await the composer. By the Fifth Book (1605) Monteverdi will allude to these technique more explicitly, clearing the path for radical changes that will definitively alter the madrigal and project the genre into the sphere of the new Baroque sensibility. (GLOSSA)

La Venexiana CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI Terzo Libro dei Madrigali

The dedication of the Terzo Libro di Madrigali a cinque voci, published in Venice in 1592 by Ricciardo Amadino, represents the first documentary evidence that we have of Monteverdi’s stay in Mantua, where the composer had been working since 1590 as an instrumentalist playing the viola at the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga. Being connected to one of the era’s most flourishing and active cultural centres could not but exert a profound influence on the composer’s stylistic and aesthetic principles. Indeed, this new collection from Monteverdi appears in many ways to reflect the ambience alive in Mantua. Two names stand out in the selection of literary texts employed by Monteverdi: Giovanni Battista Guarini and Torquato Tasso, both poets at the Ferrara court who nevertheless maintained close ties with Mantua. But it is in the change of expressive registers above all where the most significant innovations are to be best appreciated...

The Third Book of Madrigals stands as a landmark in the Monteverdian exploration of the internal life of the word, which the music picks up and amplifies with renewed sensitivity and force. On the other hand, the contrapuntal fullness of episodes such as found at the start of Se per estremo ardore prompts us to see in this collection also the culmination of a certain “classicism”, a brilliant and final affirmation of the possibilities of the prima prattica. This miraculous balance between tradition and innovation perhaps may be the reason for the extraordinary success of the publication. Five reprintings in less than two decades bear witness to the recognition which the composer’s own contemporaries rendered to the exceptional nature of the Third Book. (GLOSSA)

La Venexiana CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI Secondo Libro dei Madrigali

Published in 1590, the Second Book of Madrigals represents, within the context of Monteverdi’s total output, the conquest of pure and immediate visual metaphor. No other Monteverdi collection overflows with so many images and descriptions of Nature. Visions of rivers, sunrises, breezes,birds, flowers, skies, fountains...

It is no coincidence that these madrigals, published by Monteverdi in the hopes of securing a position for himself in Milan, drew the attention of the court of Mantua and its duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, a great collector of artworks. A unique and exceptional chapter in the career of a musician who would progressively submerge himself in an analysis of the human spirit, the Second Book establishes the luminous coordinates of the fascinating equation between hearing and seeing. The Baroque was at the door, but these aural pictures seem to look back to the great legacy of Renaissance civilization.

The members of La Venexiana continue their journey through the entire collection of Monteverdi’s madrigals with another absolutely delightful recording, where they reach unparalleled levels of excellence in this most demanding repertoire with an exquisite display of interpretive maturity. Surely, another landmark in Glossa’s Monteverdi Edition. (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)