Strozzi: L'Eraclito amoroso 'Udite amanti'

Emmanuelle Haim follows her 2006 recording of Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda with an unusual and inventive programme on the theme of the Lamento, the literary and dramatic form that found its seventeenth-century musical archetype in Monteverdi’s celebrated Lamento d’Arianna.

Emmanuelle Haim has taken great care in choosing 9 soloists to perform these demanding works amongst which Véronique Gens sings the Lamento d’Arianna, the tantalising fragment from Monteverdi’s lost opera of 1608; Natalie Dessay is the abandoned nymph in the very different Lamento della ninfa from the Eighth Book of Madrigals. Alongside these familiar works by Monteverdi the programme includes Philippe Jaroussky in Barbara Strozzi’s dramatic monologue L’Eraclito amoroso, probably written for Strozzi herself, Carissimi’s Lamento di Maria Stuarda (with Patrizia Ciofi) and Strozzi’s teacher Cavalli’s Lamento d’Egisto (with Rolando Villazón, who also sings Orfeo’s Lamento). Joyce DiDonato, recently signed to EMI/Virgin Classics as an exclusive artist, adds Ottavia’s heartrending farewell to Rome from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea.

Magdalena Kožená explores the early Italian Baroque music of Monteverdi and his contemporaries with rewarding results. Inspired by the improvisational nature of much of this music, Kožená reveals yet another aspect of her musical personality.

Teamed with the six string-instrumentalists and percussion of the acclaimed consort group Private Musicke, Magdalena Kožená delivers an album in a fascinatingly different setting from any of her previous Baroque recordings.

In music ranging from simple lamento to rollicking dance tunes, Magdalena Kožená unleashes her refined vocal and expressive abilities to convey every nuance implicit in the music and the texts.

“The Czech mezzo . . . produces one of the loveliest sounds to be heard on the world’s stages – a flowing, spring-water-like tone that evokes the term ‘luminous’.” (Opera News)