Monteverdi: Lamento della Ninfa (Book 8)

Anna Prohaska possesses a beautiful voice, perfect technique, interpretive originality, and genuine charisma and character.

Singing Baroque arias by Cavalli, Handel, Monteverdi, Morley, Purcell, and Vivaldi – Anna Prohaska vividly brings life to all the fairy-like characters who inhabit this extraordinary music. Favoured by such maestri as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, and Pierre Boulez – Anna Prohaska, with Enchanted Forest, demonstrates a mature mastery of coloratura and cantilena singing.

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.

La Barcha d'Amore is an eclectic, contrasting selection of some of the most beautiful vocal and instrumental music inspired by mythology and 17th-century European love poetry. Music of time and memory, performed by Montserrat Figueras and Jordi Savall, together with Ton Koopman, Hopkinson Smith,Andrew Lawrence-King and other members of the ensemble Hespèrion XX (which in 2001 became Hespèrion XXI) and the orchestra Le Concert Des Nations, have selected recordings that they made from 1976 to 1996 for the labels Emi Electrola, Dhm,Astrée and Auvidis, and from 1998 to 2008 for Aliavox. This anthology, contains vocal pieces directly related to the theme of love, such as the innovative Airs for the recitar cantando of Giulio Caccini's Le Nuove Musiche, the evocative tonos humanos by Spanish Baroque composers Sebastián Durón, Juan del Vado and Juan Hidalgo, Monteverdi's sublime Lamento della Ninfa, the mysterious folia Yo soy la locura by Henri du Bailly, not forgetting the touching Elizabethan lullaby and the tender melody Une jeune fillette, both by anonymous authors, but equally remarkable for their great beauty and depth of emotion. The various instrumental pieces, with such evocative titles as the Gaillarde "La Barcha del mio Amore" by Giacomo de Gorzanis, Samuel Scheidt's Pavane and his "Courant dolorosa", the Elizabethan "Desperada" and the highly popular improvisation piece, "Greensleeves", as well as the great Jean-Baptiste Lully's Rondeau from Le Mariage forcé and the Chaconne from L'Amour Médecin, provide the necessary complement to the vocal pieces, resulting in a great variety of sources and contrasting characters. The Barcha d'Amore is the personal testimony of Jordi Savall's unwavering and rigorous commitment to the performance of music from the Middle Ages to the age of Classicism using 'historically informed' instruments and performance techniques, which emerged in the 1970s.Those years marked the beginning of a great revival in the performance of pre-Romantic music, a continuing revival which offers the possibility of retrieving an important cultural legacy.

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.

The Ostinato literally went through ages… It’s a musical process founded on the repetition of a rhythmic, or melodic, or harmonic formula. It’s the ’weft’ of passacaglias, ciacconas… and of very popular works such as Ravel’s Boléro, or Pachelbel’s Canon. This process also inspired a lot of pop musicians, or minimalist American composers. Vincent Dumestre chose this way to propose, as much to 'fans' as to the general public, a thematic route within the best Poème Harmonique’s recordings. It’s at the same time a sort of Poème Harmonique’s portrait, proposed at a very attractive price…

This innovative programme, created at Ambronay Festival in 2009 by the Argentine Leonardo García Alarcón chief sees musicians alternate between baroque and modern instruments to interpret the most beautiful pages of Piazzolla (Milonga del Angel, Ballada para un loco) and Monteverdi (Lamento della ninfa, Orfeo). During the extensive live tour of this project in 2009, members of the audience pointed out that in the end they didn’t know where Monteverdi stopped and Piazzolla began. This is what the principal musicians had to say: "When I meet up with my musician friends, Argentinians of Europe like myself, we often start improvising and I discover we have a musical colour in common: the tango is never far away...The madrigal and the tango are affetti (emotions) that dictate the musical form. That’s also why it seemed such an obvious idea to me to associate them, quite apart from the fact that the energy of Monteverdi’s music is similar to that of Piazzolla’s. You can interpret them with the same freedom, allowing yourself to be guided by your emotions. The other aspect of mingling the two approaches, very liberating from the standpoint of the professional skills of a ‘classical’ musician, is the realisation of the way music evolves from one generation to another. My grandfather used to sing tangos, my father’s generation were rock enthusiasts, and I play early music having inherited all of that." Leonardo García Alarcón

William Sabatier: "Many of the Argentinian musicians who swept into Europe in the late seventies and early eighties were steeped in a different culture from that of the tango, which at that time was thought of in Argentina as ‘old people’s music’. And it was in Europe that they finally rediscovered the essence of the tango, prompted by the urge to get back to their roots, their identity...Before this project, I didn’t know Baroque music, which gave me the impression of being a kind of ‘folklore’. The work of collecting information in an almost archaeological way and the attempt to ‘bring it back to life’ were a new discovery for me...I must pay tribute here to Quito Gato. His arrangements are the subtle binders between the worlds of Monteverdi and Piazzolla. Quito and Leonardo gave a key role to the bandoneon, a colour that sets the whole ensemble ablaze. These encounters have led to friendships and projects that would never have come about otherwise. Like, for example, the duo with Diego Valentín Flores: he sings the tango with a profundity, a finesse and a commitment that gives me goose-pimples."

Quito Gato: "The encounter with William Sabatier was an incredibly rich experience for me personally and for the project as a whole. Leonardo was lucky enough to find in him a composer, an immensely gifted interpreter of classical music and tango, and a virtuoso on the bandoneon. He surprised us with his phenomenal knowledge of the language of the tango, its history, its different styles, its innumerable technical and aesthetic twists and turns, which he masters to perfection. Indeed, one of the great masters of the tango, one of the greatest bandoneonists, Leopoldo Federico, said to William: ‘You can’t possibly be French, you must have been born in Buenos Aires.’"

After years of research and musical maturation Vincent Dumestre presents Marazzoli’s La Fiera di Farfa, a world première on disc, accompanied by gems of Monteverdi’s profane vocal music.

La Fiera contains a parody of Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, composed only a year earlier. Alpha have therefore chosen to record both works, together with some extra pieces including Hor che'l ciel, an emblem of the early baroque which strongly influenced later writing. Composed by Marco Marazzoli in 1639, La Fiera di Farfa is an operatic interlude, drama set to music, as was practiced at 17th century Italian fairs. This piece was so well known that it was adapted for the stage by Bernini, played throughout the 18th century, and was still commented on during the 19th. Le Poème Harmonique was founded in 1998 by Vincent Dumestre, and focuses its artistic activity on the performance of 17th and 18th century music. The group are well-known for their original vocal and instrumental interpretations as well as cross-genre programmes involving actors, dancers and even acrobats. 2004 saw the expansion of Le Poème Harmonique’s small scale repertoire of chamber music, with the revival of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, a comédie-ballet by Molière and Lully. Their most recent production, Lully’s lyrical tragedy, Cadmius and Hermione, was premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in January 2009. This is to be succeeded by Cavalli’s opera Egisto which will again be presented at the Opéra-Comique, in autumn 2011. After his sell-out lunchtime Prom, Vincent Dumestre now presents the CD.