La célèbre épopée biblique relatant le meurtre d’Abel par Caïn est connue de tous, mais la mise en scène qu’Alessandro Scarlatti lui a dédiée l’est beaucoup moins. Thème récurant pour les oratorios italiens au XVIIe siècle, le sujet est traité ici à la manière d’une histoire policière. Avec un effectif musical réduit, il nous transporte dans un univers baroque étourdissant. Les accents lyriques sont d’une expressivité rare tandis que l’orchestre, faisant preuve de beaucoup de psychologie, exulte. Par bonheur, la prise de son est à l’avenant. Les divers plans sonores sont respectés avec une très belle transparence et une foule de détails sur les voix et sur les instruments.

Extraordinarily, Alessandro Scarlatti (who died in 1725 and forms a strong bridge between the mature Baroque and later classical traditions, according to musicologist Edward Dent) wrote some sixty-four operas, twenty oratorios, hundreds of chamber cantatas, and a host of madrigals, masses, motets, toccatas, concertos, sonatas and symphonies. Very little of this is heard today, sadly, except in specialist circles. Perhaps one of the more popularly performed pieces is 'Abramo, il tuo sembiante' (a Christmas cantata). When Handel visited Italy between 1706 and 1710, he met Scarlatti and may even have studied with him. This performance of said cantata is well within the Italian style - clear lines and intricate ornamentation.

Carlo Gesualdo is one of the most fascinating composers. It is hard to escape the temptation of seeing in his madrigals the tortured reflection of his psyche, beginning with the murder committed in 1590, when he caught his first wife Maria d’Avalos in blatant adultery with her lover Fabrizio Carafa. The madrigals of the Fifth and Sixth Books are to Gesualdo what the black paintings are to Goya: works conceived in a state of solitude, with no fetters on the artist’s imagination, born in enclosed spaces and used to moving around in their gloom. It is a music fitting to resonate in remote and unusual places.

As part of their comprehensive survey of the music of Claudio Monteverdi, Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana delivered an exceptional version of L’Orfeo, a reading which had been honed by their trailblazing interpretations of the composer’s madrigals. This highly-esteemed recording of the favola in musica – critics applauded and fêted it in many different countries – subsequently dropped out of the catalogue and Glossa is very pleased to have the opportunity to return it there as part of this year’s 450th anniversary commemorations of the composer’s birth.

Two of the brightest singing talents to have emerged from Italy in recent years, Giulia Semenzato and Raffaele Pe, join forces for Sospiri d’amore, a dazzling celebration of operatic arias and duets by that Baroque master of amorous emotions, Francesco Cavalli. Soprano and countertenor are supported by a modern master of Italian Baroque style in Claudio Cavina, who directs La Venexiana (Cavina has also led the Glossa recording of Cavalli’s 1656 opera Artemisia).

Composed in three different moments (in Italy, Hanover and London), these delicious duets contain a lot of music that Handel later reused in great works like The Messiah, The Passion of Brockers, Solomon, Jubilate de Chandos, Alcina, Aquatic Music, Esther, Belshazzar , Judas Macabeo, Deborah or the Jubilate of Utrecht, to name a few. Technically very difficult, these jewels contain movements of great beauty and passages of enormous virtuosity that demonstrate not only the brilliance of Handel's vocal writing, but its insurmountable melodic sense and musical imagery. Rossana Bertini and Claudio Cavina, founders of Concerto Italiano, demonstrate the reason why they are considered among the most important specialists in baroque singing.

The Italian Steffani spent most of his fabulous career as a composer, spy, and diplomat in Germany, in München and Hanover, with a prolonged visit to Paris to the court of Louis XIV. In terms of the prevalent national styles of music in the late 17th C, Steffani was "all over the place" – his overtures are thoroughly French, his arias sparklingly Italian, and his mastery of counterpoint profoundly German. Does that stylistic Duke's Mixture ring any bells? A certain pair of Germans born in 1685, one revered for his cantatas and the other for his operas, were both indebted to Steffani for his synthesis of Italian, French, and German fashions.

Originally recorded in an Italian villa in 1992, this release covered German solo vocal music ranging over much of the 17th century, most of it with the melancholy tone suggested by the album's title. Its release by Spain's Glossa label in 2009 was likely due to the fact that it includes music that even by then remained unfamiliar. The biggest attraction is the sextet of songs, and songs are what they are, by Adam Krieger, the founder of the Leipzig Collegium Musicum Bach decades later. Some are secular, some sacred, and they sound very little like Schütz, Schein, or the comparable Italian works of the period; they're free in shape, rather light-hearted, and apparently written for the entertainment of aristocratic amateurs.

The Concerti delle Dame, or Concerts of the Ladies, were secret events held by the Duke of Ferrara, using a consort of sopranos at his court. The organizer was the duke's court composer, the melodiously named Luzzasco Luzzaschi, who also composed chromatic madrigals in a language approaching that of Gesualdo. But these works experimented with the declamatory, chordal, highly ornamented style that became known as the seconda pratica.

The members of the ensemble La Venexiana won in 1994 the Gramophone Award for Early Music under the name Concerto Italiano. They are some of the most experienced European performers in the early music field, and have been singing together for many years, establishing a new style in Italian early music performances: a warm, truly Mediterranean blend of textual declamation, textural color and harmonic refinement. This repertoire seems to be created as if to let them fully show their expressive powers. Barbara Strozzi's talent shines in this pieces, designed to show her excepcional dramatic powers and unique gifts for musical imaginery. Many of these madrigals have the appearance of a succession of operatic scenes in miniature, each with its particular dramatic atmosphere and with the participation of several soloists.

The extraordinary series of 1998-2006 recordings of the nine published books of madrigals by Monteverdi, from Claudio Cavina and the Italian ensemble La Venexiana, is now available in limited-time and limited-number boxed set form from Glossa. This multi-award-winning cycle set new standards in textual declamation, rhetorical color and harmonic refinement. Also included is the Live in Corsica album of Monteverdi madrigals (2002) and a newly-written essay by original series essayist Stefano Russomanno of which all, along with full texts and translations in PDF form, are also included.

Over the years Glossa has been at the forefront of releasing recordings of late Renaissance madrigals, and the label has had the pleasure of assisting superlative artists in doing so: none more so than the voices of La Venexiana and its director Claudio Cavina. This release is a reflection of such creative richness. The recordings on this release date from the dozen years after La Venexianas foundation in 1996, a time of great activity for the ensemble, and which complements the Monteverdi Complete Madrigals Books set, released previously. These two impressive collections demonstrate effectively why La Venexiana has been so popular with audiences and why it has been praised by critics as well.

Italian Renaissance composer Luca Marenzio was internationally recognized as the leading composer of madrigals at the height of his career, in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. He was so popular (and the sales of his music so lucrative) that within years of his death, both Flemish and German publishers had issued volumes of his complete five and six part madrigals, an honor almost unheard of at the time. Marenzio's madrigals, while anticipating the songlike lyricism of monody that would come to dominate vocal music of the early Baroque, made full use of the textural and expressive qualities of Renaissance polyphony.

This is a selection of rarely-heard intimate compositions by the incredibly prolific composer, Alessandro Scarlatti. He had great affinity with opera and indeed, wrote dozens of them. His dramatic vein shows itself in many of his smaller-scale vocal works too, particularly the secular (chamber) cantatas (of which genre he wrote no less than 820), duets and in the three intermezzos. In each case, the music conveys the precise meaning of the text, which is partly in dialect. Here, the composer achieves a unique level of expressiveness.