Monteverdi: Lamento d'Arianna 'Lasciatemi morire'

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.

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.

After winning the Concorso Belli, Monica Bacelli made her debut in Spoleto as Cherubino and Dorabella. Since then her career has taken her to major theatres in Italy and throughout the world including La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, Salzburg Festival, Covent Garden and to leading orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Her wide repertoire includes all the principle Mozart roles for mezzo soprano (Idamante, Cherubino, Elvira, Dorabella and Sesto), Rossini, baroque (Monteverdi, Cavalli, Handel) as well as French operas including Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Werther, Don Quichotte and L’Enfant et les sortilèges.

Monica Bacelli is recognised as a leading interpreter of contemporary music both in concert and on the stage. She has sung many world premieres including the title role in Ivan Fedele’s Antigone at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. She is noted for her long collaboration with Luciano Berio who wrote several roles for her as well as the chamber work Altra voce presented at the Salzburg Festival as part of the Pollini project, and repeated in New York, Tokyo, Paris and Rome.

She has also sung Berio’s Folk Songs many times including at La Scala Milan, with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Ensemble Intercontemporain and at the Proms in London.

Her searching interpretative curiosity, her interest in chamber music and her research into unusual vocal repertoire have led her in recent years into a wide variety of projects ranging from early to contemporary music, with a focus on Italian art song of the 20th century.

Monica Bacelli is the recipient of the Premio Abbiati, a prize awarded by the Italian music critics.

As part of the Movimentos series, the wonderful mezzo-soprano Mareike Morr brings all the apprehensive and furious heroines back to life on her debut Genuin CD. Together with the frothing and murmuring tones of the Hannoversche Hofkapelle, she performs arias by Handel and Vivaldi, bewails Euridice as Gluck’s Orpheus and to heart-rending effect breathes her last as Purcell’s Dido.

La Venexiana has recorded all eight volumes of Monteverdi's madrigals, the Selva morale e spirituale and L'Orfeo. Here we have the Scherzi musicali published in Venice by Bartolomeo Magni in 1632, although pieces from other publications, such as the Arie di diversi raccolte of Vincenti (1634) and the Quarto scherzo delle ariose vaghezze of Milanuzzi (1624) are also included. By way of contrast, the finishing touch is provided by a dazzling and moving rendition of the Lamento di Arianna in an arrangement by Cavina himself, wherein the voice of Emanuela Galli, the star of this disc, is draped in a string ensemble led by Svetlana Fomina.