L'héritage de Monteverdi

Albumbeschreibung

The heritage of Claudio Monteverdi is generally supposed to reside in the tradition of Venetian opera that he founded, and that bloomed into opera as it is known today. This disc explores a considerably less familiar body of music that followed Monteverdi's towering example: his innovations stimulated new thinking in the young genre of the instrumental sonata, with the word "sonata" here used in its original sense of "something played." The works presented here are short pieces for varying small ensembles of brass, winds, and strings. Some of them have the antiphonal layout of Giovanni Gabrieli's instrumental works, and anyone who enjoys those cornerstones of the brass repertory might check this out to discover how the next generation adapted instrumental styles after having heard Monteverdi's music for a while -- the variety of affects within each individual piece is greater. The composers heard here migrated over the Austrian Alps to serve the Hapsburg court in Vienna, thereby inaugurating two centuries of Italian musical migration northward, and the disc is divided into two halves that suggest programs that two successive Austrian emperors might have heard. A Monteverdi madrigal, with voices, is heard at the end.
This is a rather wonky release, with more footnotes than primary text on a couple of facing pages of the booklet. The reader will be confused to see so much of the booklet devoted to Monteverdi himself, but the idea is to clarify the webs of noble patronage that underlay his music, and this "concerto imperiale" has a lot to offer anyone interested in the nexus between music and politics in the early seventeenth century. The mixed French-Italian authentic-instruments group La Fenice has a tendency toward bouncy articulation that takes a little bit of getting used to, but their re-creation of the sounds of the era, with plenty of unfamiliar instrumental sounds, is rich and broad. Dario Castello, Giovanni Battista Buonamente, and the other composers here aren't going to become household names, but listeners snared by the splendor of the early Baroque will find lots of new information here. Libraries should have this disc as well, for it uncovers a poorly served repertory.

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