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The popularity of the film Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings of the World) has revived the fortunes of the shadowy composer named Sainte-Colombe, who was active in the late seventeenth century. The film was largely fictitious, but subsequent research, much of it nicely summarized in the notes to this disc, has shed light on who Sainte-Colombe might have been, and has shown that the filmmakers, and the novelist (Pascal Quignard) who wrote the novel on which Tous les matins du monde was based, made some good guesses about him.

With this recording the acclaimed ensemble Le Nuove Musiche, led by director Krijn Koetsveld, have at last completed a monumental undertaking nearly a decade in the making: the complete cycle of Claudio Monteverdi’s books of madrigals. Fittingly, the last instalment in this series is the final Ninth Book (Libro IX), which was published posthumously in 1651 and looks back on the breadth of the composer’s career with lighter pieces in the established forms of his day (prima prattica), in Monteverdi’s own innovative style (seconda prattica), and in a new genre that had begun to eclipse the madrigal in Monteverdi’s twilight years.