Pichon Monteverdi

After ‘Stravaganza d’amore’, their superb album of late sixteenth-century Florentine music, Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion return to Italy, this time to Mantua. Here they offer us their reading of one of the peaks of sacred music from this period: Monteverdi’s Vespers. Revealing like no other interpreters the poignant interiority of these pieces, they bring out to the full their inherent sense of theatre. An overwhelming experience.

After ‘Stravaganza d’amore’, their superb album of late sixteenth-century Florentine music, Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion return to Italy, this time to Mantua. Here they offer us their reading of one of the peaks of sacred music from this period: Monteverdi’s Vespers. Revealing like no other interpreters the poignant interiority of these pieces, they bring out to the full their inherent sense of theatre. An overwhelming experience.

Late sixteenth-century Florence was a theatre: first and foremost a political one, in the eyes of the dynasties that wished to use the arts to display their power. A humanist one too, as is shown by these intermedi (interludes) that sought to achieve the perfect blend between music and poetry, the ideal of a certain Renaissance. Inserted into plays imitating the ancient writers, these entertainments were presented with lavish visual and musical resources. After reaching an initial peak in 1589 with the intermedi composed for Bargagli’s La pellegrina, this tradition was prolonged in the burgeoning genre of opera by such composers as Peri, Caccini (Euridice, 1600) and, very soon, Monteverdi (L’Orfeo) and Gagliano (Dafne).

To celebrate their 60 years of activity, Harmonia Mundi has released 2 commemorative CD boxsets to showcase classical artists and composers. This first volume invites you to relive the highlights of the first 30 years of the label and pays tribute to the artists who built Harmonia Mundi on the heights of Saint-Michel-de-Provence, leading with a passionate quest for excellence a real revolution in the world of early music.

The works of the theorbist Bellerofonte Castaldi and the guitarist Domenico Pellegrini are little known but nonetheless remain fascinating to their performers today, as they not only give clear proof of fertile musical imagination but also raise many questions about how they should be performed. Although Castaldi was the first to praise the innovative style of his friend Monteverdi, his works are marked by a strong Renaissance spirit. Castaldi and Pellegrini chose not only the most classical forms (dances, courantes, galliards) but also the most archaic (branles, batailles, canzoni). Lutenist, theorbist and baroque guitarist Albane Imbs now presents her first solo album after having founded her own ensemble, Les Kapsber'girls and played in ensembles led by Jordi Savall, François Lazarevitch, Raphaël Pichon and Rolf Lislevand, the great Norwegian lutenist/theorbist who was her teacher. Here, Imbs and Lislevand perform Castaldi’s Capricci a due stromenti, the only example of music written for a duo of theorbo and tiorbino, this latter being a miniature theorbo conceived and played by Castaldi himself.