Madrigali Libro

Claudio Monteverdi's late works, like those of Beethoven, contain singular mixtures of simplicity and complexity. Book Eight of his madrigals are about love and war, themes as elemental as they come. Yet consider the madrigal Ogni amante è guerrier (Every Lover is a Warrior, track 6 on the first CD of this set), with its text by Ottavio Rinuccini that subtly conflates the two ideas. Monteverdi's setting, for a low voice, is moody, involved, and philosophical.

"For the non-specialist," observed Early Music World, "detailed consideration of Marenzio's large body of madrigals remains a vain quest in the light of the lack of comprehensive accessibility to either printed or recorded music." This release from Spain's Glossa label helps rectify the situation with precise yet stylistically sensitive performances of a key set of Luca Marenzio madrigals from the vocal group La Venexiana.

As might be expected, this is an excellent recording with the Consort of Musicke in superb form and a well-balanced, crystal-clear sound from the production team for the Virgin Classics Veritas label. What will come as more of a surprise is the music of the Mantuan maestro di cappella Giaches de Wert, a familiar enough figure in the history books as Monteverdi's predecessor and mentor at the Gonzaga court, but whose madrigals are still largely confined to tomes on dusty library shelves. No longer: in these performances of his Seventh Book of Madrigals of 1581 they leap off the page, teeming with the musical ideas triggered by the composer's imaginative and often inspired response to his texts.

Claudio Monteverdi's Seventh Book of Madrigals have been recorded well by several early music groups, but one expects superior readings from harpsichordist Rinaldo Alessandrini and his vocal-instrumental ensemble Concerto Italiano, and indeed, one gets them here. Alessandrini's versions are on the spare side, with seven voices and an instrumental ensemble of 13 that includes three continuo instruments plus percussion, with Alessandrini's harpsichord prominent in the mix, but he has all the equipment he needs to deliver a really distinctive "concerto," as the title of the Seventh Book boldly proclaims itself. With this book, Monteverdi moved decisively away from the old polyphonic madrigal ideal and toward the text-based settings that would be the norm for vocal music over the next four centuries and counting.

Sigismondo d’India, actif à Parme, Turin et Modène, fut un compositeur d’une grande originalité qui suivit partiellement et à sa manière propre la révolution monteverdienne mais aussi le sillage du chromatisme particulier des ferrarais et de Gesualdo sans côté tourmenté de ce dernier. Il apparaît comme un de ses rares successeurs.

The style of Italian early music conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano might be described as both strongly expressive and highly intelligent. Consider this recording of Monteverdi's Sixth Book of Madrigals, pieces that hover between the older polyphonic madrigal tradition and the newer, essentially soloistic and dramatic language of opera. The texts of these mostly five-part pieces focus almost exclusively on extremely melancholy depictions of mourning for love lost, mostly through death – something Alessandrini in his detailed and highly informative notes attributes to the death of Monteverdi's wife and his favorite female student shortly before the music was composed. Alessandrini takes the ideal of text expression as paramount, downplaying larger formal details in favor of a sequence of extremely intense moments.

First recordings of madrigals by Giovanni Ghizzolo! Giovanni Ghizzolo (fl. 1600) was a highly respected composer, active at the grand court of Correggio, and creator of truly amazing madrigals, in which the complexity of the polyphony is stretched to its limits, his originality comparable to his famous contemporary Gesualdo.

The elegant rhetoric betrays Gesualdo's aristocratic background, and its internal contradiction neatly reflects the baffling ingenuity of his work, whose dissonances were literally centuries ahead of his time, their bold gambits regarded with suspicion by his 16th-century peers, and even now testing the imagination and ingenuity of even as accomplished a team as the Hilliard quartet.

Founded in Amsterdam in 1979 by Alan Curtis, one of the most acclaimed specialists in the interpretation of pre-romantic music, Il Complesso Barocco, has become a renowned international baroque orchestra with a focus on Italian Baroque opera and oratorio. Their rich discography was for a time devoted to the late madrigal repertory, and the film director Werner Herzog chose the ensemble as protagonists for his film Morte a cinque voci (Prix Italia 1996 and Premio Rembrandt, Amsterdam 1996) dedicated to the composer Carlo Gesualdo.