Barbara Strozzi

The members of the ensemble La Venexiana won in 1994 the Gramophone Award for Early Music under the name Concerto Italiano. They are some of the most experienced European performers in the early music field, and have been singing together for many years, establishing a new style in Italian early music performances: a warm, truly Mediterranean blend of textual declamation, textural color and harmonic refinement. This repertoire seems to be created as if to let them fully show their expressive powers. Barbara Strozzi's talent shines in this pieces, designed to show her excepcional dramatic powers and unique gifts for musical imaginery. Many of these madrigals have the appearance of a succession of operatic scenes in miniature, each with its particular dramatic atmosphere and with the participation of several soloists.

The virtuoso Venetian diva of the 17th century, Barbara Strozzi, Monteverdi's heiress, journeys the passions of the soul through a daring mosaic of styles and rhythms. Leonardo Garcia Alarcon, who is one of the rising generation of baroque conductors, is leading a major research project on the specific parameters which make up musical performance, paying particular attention to improvisation techniques and the relationship between text and music. His work at the Ambronay Festival has focused on the performance of 17th-century Italian music including rich and little-known repertoire of motets and madrigals by Barbara Strozzi, Isabella Leonarda and Antonia Bembo.

An homage to the Baroque singer and composer Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), this album is titled La voce sola. That final word, 'single', 'only' or 'alone', points to the fact that most of Strozzi's works are written for solo voice, usually her own, a fact that makes her music especially intimate and personal. It emphasizes the uniqueness of her musical language and her distinctive voice as a composer but also refers to the difficulties of her striving alone in her personal and creative endeavors. This recital is a career survey of this great composer, from her first collections to her last opus, in chronological order, including a world-premiere recording of a work with no opus number.

Voglio cantar – ‘I want to sing’ – is Emőke Baráth’s first solo album for Erato. The young Hungarian soprano has built a special reputation in Baroque music and the prime focus here is on Barbara Strozzi, who made her name as a composer in 17th century Venice. “She must have been quite a revolutionary personality,” says Emőke Baráth. “Her music is improvisational, intuitive, even rhapsodic … She was clearly a passionate woman with a strong dramatic sense.” Baráth is joined by Il Pomo d’Oro, conducted by Francesco Corti.

This powerful yet understated recital of modern and seventeenth-century works aims to revisit but also to re-balance the obsession of earlier music with female abandonment and lament. The stories of women such as Dido and Ariadne have been told and retold throughout history. Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston reconsiders the assumed helplessness of those often seen as being left behind by male adventure and success. A recent work commissioned for Charlston from the composer Owain Park further takes up the challenge of giving ‘abandoned women’ their own platform, as well as exploring new possibilities for an instrumental pairing – that of voice and theorbo – that remains little explored in contemporary music.

Venice, Rome, Naples witnessed the birth of the compositions found on this CD, places with pasts of thriving musical communities. In addition, these contained some of the greatest artistic innovation of the time.The "stile moderno", which marks the beginning of a new period in music, has its origins in Italy in the late 16th century, when composers such as Claudio Monteverdi and Giulio Caccini created a new expressive style, soon to affect the development of the whole of occidental music.

Several female composers achieved some slight renown in 17th-century Italy, but none was more widely known or praised than the extraordinary Barbara Strozzi. This famously virtuoso singer wrote herself truly imaginative, compelling music–the wide-ranging, fluttering runs of the wedding song "Gite, o giorni dolenti," the passionate anguish and the unsettling chromatic turns in the melody of "Lagrime mie," the coquettish humor of "La sol fa mi re do," and on and on. For this "portrait of Barbara Strozzi," Catherine Bott gives a spectacular performance, encompassing the wide range (both vocal and emotional) and technical challenges of this music with ease and dramatic flair.

The lament became a current and important feature of Italian Baroque monody, with its rhetorical and therefore dramatic connotations, generally set over a four-note descending bass line. The best known, though not the earliest, of these laments is probably Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna, a later version of which, with a sacred Latin text, was included in the composer's Selva morale e spirituale, published in Venice in 1641. In 1607 Monteverdi had provided the music for a favola in musica performed at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua, where the composer was maestro di cappella. Orfeo, with a libretto by Alessandro striggio, has a literary source in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. The success of Orfeo led to the creation of a new dramatic work, a tragedy in musica, in 1608, a deliberate attempt, as the pastoral Orfeo was not, to create a work that would in some way revive ancient Greek tragedy.

This is the only recording of sacred music by the extraordinary 17th-century Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi. The Latin works in her collection Sacri Affetti Musicali were entirely suitable for church performance–something Strozzi herself, as a woman outside a convent, was forbidden to do. Most likely she performed these pieces as "spiritual recreation" at meetings of the "Academy of the Unisons" founded by her father, a well-known poet.