Cristina Pasqua

Sigismondo d'India, 'nobleman of Palermo', as he called himself, composer, singer and poet, was a true child of dawning century. Like his great contemporary Monteverdi, he succeeded in integrating polyphony into the new monodic style. But it is above all in his Musiche da cantar solo that he showed his measure as an innovator. These madrigals for solo voice, selected from around a hundred works he wrote in this genre, provide dazzling evidence of the fact.

Most of Monteverdi's motets for one voice were among his late publications, like the celebrated Selva morale e spirituale (Venice, 1640). An aboluste master of what he called the seconda prattica, he demonstrated in these pieces all of the skill he had acquired over the years in writing for the solo voice. Just as he had taken the madrigal to its peak of perfection, Monteverdi here realises the achievements of the Baroque period in this form of religious music inherited from the early centuries of polyphonic writing. The performers have striven to revive the typically Venetian context of the time, placing these sublime works in a framework of instrumental toccatas and sinfonias by his contemporaries Marini, Merulo and Antegnati.

During his long life, the priest, nobleman, poet, and painter from Rome, Ermenegildo del Cinque (1700–73) wrote over 100 sonatas for two cellos and eighteen pieces for three cellos. Although he was a dilettante di musica, he was the most prolific composer of cello music of all time. Yet despite the fact that he also composed cantatas, a serenata and some sacred music, and was a renowned cellist in Rome, he remains virtually unknown today, even among cellists. This recording, made in the theatre of the Palazzo Altemps in Rome where del Cinque often performed, rescues some of these extraordinarily beautiful compositions from oblivion.