Lotti La Vita Caduca

Il Complesso Barocco recorded two CDs with madrigals by Rossi and Lotti in the late 90s. In the 16th century, madrigal originated in Rome as a worldly vocal work. The text was important and was used as a starting point for the music. This form quickly became popular in Venice and other important cities. Also in the 17th century many composers continued to compose madrigals, but these were more modern, with dissonants and bold harmonies. Rossi used mostly older texts and managed to set them to music with great precision. Lotti lived decades later and composed expressively, with a lot of chromaticism.

In as much as Alessandro Scarlatti's music is known at all, it is the large-scale operas and the chamber cantatas that have justifiably attracted the most attention. That the leading composer for the Neapolitan stage should also have turned his hand to madrigal composition, by then a distinctly outmoded and declining genre, is easily overlooked, yet a handful of such pieces have survived in manuscripts and, as this record persuasively argues, they certainly deserve a hearing. Perhaps even more surprising than their existence and survival is their style; Scarlatti eschews the possibilities of the basso continuo and opts instead for a language which at times echoes the techniques of the great age of madrigal-writing of some 100 years earlier, and above all the music of Monteverdi and Gesualdo.