Maria Cristina Nardone

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.

In a very specific sense in 16th- and 17th-century Spain and again in today’s Mexico (and elsewhere in Latin America) the Spanish term son denotes a particular genre of music with certain common traits including a close association with dance, text composed of several verses (coplas) and a fundamental harmonic pattern unique to each son.

L'apparition de compositrices en Italie au Seicento, siècle d'un extraordinaire bouillonnement musical, est un phénomène unique par son ampleur et la qualité des musiques qui nous sont parvenues. Qui ne connaît la compositrice et cantatrice virtuose Barbara Strozzi, ou encore Francesca Caccini, première femme a avoir composé des opéras ? De même, les œuvres de Caterina Assandra et Isabella Leonarda, empreintes d'un réel mysticisme, sont saisissantes. La cantatrice Maria-Cristina Kiehr, à la voix d'une extrême sensualité, accompagnée du Concerto Soave de Jean-Marc Aymes, nous plongent au cœur de la vitalité artistique de l'Italie du Seicento.

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.

L'apparition de compositrices en Italie au Seicento, siècle d'un extraordinaire bouillonnement musical, est un phénomène unique par son ampleur et la qualité des musiques qui nous sont parvenues. Qui ne connaît la compositrice et cantatrice virtuose Barbara Strozzi, ou encore Francesca Caccini, première femme a avoir composé des opéras ? De même, les œuvres de Caterina Assandra et Isabella Leonarda, empreintes d'un réel mysticisme, sont saisissantes. La cantatrice Maria-Cristina Kiehr, à la voix d'une extrême sensualité, accompagnée du Concerto Soave de Jean-Marc Aymes, nous plongent au cœur de la vitalité artistique de l'Italie du Seicento.

In attempting to select something from the vast pool of solo cantatas left behind by Alessandro Scarlatti, it's hard to know what to highlight. Argentine soprano Maria Cristina Kiehr, a prominent European early music specialist who honed her craft in the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis under René Jacobs, casts in her lot with both the elder Scarlatti and Concerto Soave in a recital consisting of three of the elder Scarlatti's solo cantatas in Harmonia Mundi's Alessandro Scarlatti: Bella madre de' fiori.

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.

Monteverdi's larger choral pieces are so masterly that they tend to overshadow his chamber scale sacred music the solo works in particular. Occasionally one or two of these exquisite motets will appear on a collection such as Paul McCreesh's Venetian Vespers, but rarely do they become the focus of an entire recording as they are here. The much-admired early-music diva Maria Cristina Kiehr has a slightly constricted quality to her voice that won't appeal to everyone, but her very narrow vibrato colors her sound without affecting her accuracy of pitch, spotless coloratura, or blend with period instruments (played beautifully here by Concerto Soave).