Monteverdi: O sia tranquillo il mare (Book 8)

This set gathers 2 albums released in 1990 and 1994.

Each of them definitely established Montserrat Figueras as one of the best performers of Claudio Monteverdi’s vocal music. At this time, she developed an innovative style of interpretation, characterised by great fidelity to historical sources, combined with an extraordinary creative and expressive power, that has exerted a decisive influence on the whole historical music movement.

Vocal music before 1800 required a new technical and stylistic approach capable of restoring to the beauty and emotion of the voice, that most human of all forms of expression, the necessary balance between singing and declamation, with an emphasis on the poetic and spiritual dimension of the text.

She is accompanied by Jordi Savall on CD1 and Ton Koopman on CD2.

Claudio Monteverdi’s innovations mark the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, and he and Heinrich Schütz are considered by many to be the most important composers of the seventeenth century. This major 10-CD set features some of the greatest interpreters of Monteverdi’s music, including the renowned Concerto Italiano and its music director Rinaldo Alessandrini.

Claudio Monteverdi published his first collection of sacred works in 1582 at the age of fifteen and composed at least eighteen operas. Another genre he devoted particular attention to was the madrigal, which he viewed as material for experimentation all his life, transferring the monodic principle of opera to the originally five-part madrigal form and adding instruments to provide the harmonic basis in order to make it possible for madrigals to contain solo parts or even consist entirely of a solo part.