Barbara Strozzi

The Donne Barocche, or Baroque Women, featured here are not singers or operatic characters, but composers, and the album, originally released on the Opus 111 label in 2001 and rescued for reissue by Naïve broke new ground when it first appeared. All of the music comes from the last third of the 17th century and the first decade of the 18th. The names of composer/singer Barbara Strozzi and French keyboardist Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre were known to enthusiasts of the history of women's music and were beginning to receive mainstream performances, but the other four composers represented were new to all but scholars, and the big news was a program of music as varied in concept and affect as any by the male composers of the period.

Arie Antiche – a magical word for all who desire to enter into one of the most fascinating and powerful of musical traditions: the Italian bel canto, the realization of the artistic ideal of the natural beauty of the human voice in song. And who better to represent this ideal than Spanish soprano Maria Bayo. This, the first of Maria Bayo’s recordings for Claves Records, earned immediate recognition from critics, including receiving the «Vierteljahresliste des Deutschen Schallplattenpreises».

A 17th Century manuscript that was compiled but Albert Bobowski, a Polish musician and orientalist, contains songs of the Italian Renaissance and the Ottoman court. Bobowski, alias Ali Ufki, was born around 1610 in Poland and worked in Constantinople at the Ottoman court where he was involved with many diplomats,clerics and travellers as translator, language teacher, mediator and adviser. Thanks to his diverse skills and profound knowledge of the Islamic-Ottoman and Christian-European cultures, he became a valued mediator between the two worlds during his lifetime. In this collection of European and Ottoman vocal and instrumental, sacred and secular, court and popular music, Ali Ufki switches between languages and music genres with a fantastic ease and naturalness.

Eleven imaginative and melodically striking vocal pieces from a collection published in 1660, towards the end of the relatively short life of one of the most famous female composers, Barbara Strozzi. Ranging in length from two minutes to 14 and with a variety of moods to match, they are performed with feeling (though not a lot of colour) by Emanuela Galli with jangling support from Ensemble Galilei’s three guitars, four theorbos and (only one) organ. The haunting Lagrime mie is alone worth the price of the disc.

The successor to Music in Europe at the time of the Renaissance, this second volume in our History of Early Music is devoted to the music of the first part of the Baroque period in Italy, from the Florentine Camerata and the first operas to the heirs of Monteverdi; it was at that time that the freedom of structure characteristic of the beginning of the 17th century began to give way to the first traces of formalism. This period covers almost an entire century, beginning with the performances of La Pellegrina mounted in Florence in 1589 and ending with the final operas of Francesco Cavalli in the early 1670s. The sacred and the profane mingled and met during this period, which also saw the birth of accompanied monody, opera and oratorio, virtuoso performance and the sonata; it is precisely this same mix that we see in the Nativity by Caravaggio that appears on the cover of this set. The musical expression of this Baroque aesthetic is the subject of Jérome Lejeune’s accompanying dissertation.