A due leuti: Masterpieces for Renaissance Lute Duo
Same artist
Da Vinci Classics
Consort Vocale Diapente, Francesco Tomasi, Lucio Ivaldi
Physical and Digital Release: 8 September 2017
Consort Vocale Diapente and Lucio Ivaldi explore love and abandonment in Monteverdi's madrigals, with Francesco Tomasi's theorbo supporting the expressive dialogue between poetry and vocal writing.
Composer(s): Claudio Monteverdi · Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger
Artist(s): Consort Vocale Diapente · Lucio Ivaldi, director · Francesco Tomasi, theorbo
Barcode: 0793597061867
13.67€
Monteverdi · Madrigals of love and abandonment · 14 tracks
Timings follow Apple Music, Qobuz and TIDAL. Kapsberger’s instrumental works are performed by Francesco Tomasi; the printed timings differ.
Francesco Tomasi became interested in early music at the age of thirteen and began studying the lute with Marco Pesci and Andrea Damiani. He completed his studies at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome in 2009.
In 2012 he completed a master’s degree in lute, specialising in Baroque guitar and theorbo with Rolf Lislevand at the Musikhochschule in Trossingen. He has attended international masterclasses with Paul O’Dette, Jakob Lindberg and Nigel North.
His concert career includes collaborations with I Barocchisti, directed by Diego Fasolis; I Cameristi de La Scala, directed by Giulio Prandi; Concerto Romano, directed by Alessandro Quarta; Arte Musica, directed by Francesco Cera; L’Estravagante and Enea Baroque Orchestra, directed by Stefano Montanari; Pera Ensemble; Soqquadro Italiano; Abchordis Ensemble; and Musica Antiqua Latina. In 2010 he joined the European Union Baroque Orchestra (EUBO), performing in numerous European countries.
He has performed at venues including the Konzerthaus and Musikverein in Vienna, Casa da Música in Porto, the Herkulessaal in Munich, Opéra de Lausanne, Auditorium Santa Cecilia in Rome, Teatro La Fenice, Arena di Verona, Kharkiv Opera House and Kyiv Philharmonic. He has recorded for Brilliant Classics, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi and Christophorus.
He works as a continuo player, accompanying both established and emerging singers and instrumentalists, and as a solo performer on lute, theorbo and Spanish guitar. With the ensemble he founded, Ricercare Antico, he has developed a series of recordings devoted to Baroque composers, with particular attention to Roman Baroque music.
Consort Vocale Diapente was founded by Lucio Ivaldi and began rehearsing in February 2007. Its singers were selected by audition, and the group’s first activity was a masterclass with the Hilliard Ensemble in Florence.
Its performances have included Vivaldi’s Magnificat in the Sala Sinopoli of Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica, with the period-instrument orchestra Accademia Ottoboni and Riccardo Minasi as leader; Monteverdi’s Sestina at Teatro Valle, with a basso continuo of theorbo and Baroque harp; and another period-instrument production of Vivaldi’s Magnificat in Tivoli, with Il Concerto d’Arianna and Francesca Vicari as leader.
The consort presented a programme of Monteverdi madrigals at the ISME (International Society for Music Education) World Conference in Bologna. Its project Polifonie Vocali del XXI Secolo, supported and sponsored by SIAE (Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori), received performances in several districts of Rome.
The group also contributed to the recording anthology KZ Musik, devoted to music composed in concentration camps between 1933 and 1945, in association with the Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria, and gave related concerts in Puglia, Abruzzo and Lazio.
Lucio Ivaldi, born in Rome in 1965, has published vocal and instrumental compositions and a number of musicological papers.
In Rome he has founded and directed several ensembles, including Coro Polifonico Diego Carpitella, Coro Symphonia, Gruppo Vocale Symphonia, Orchestra Diapente and Consort Vocale Diapente. He has collaborated with Centro di Pratica Musicale, Ensemble Vocale Thesaurus and Centro Italiano di Musica Antica. He has organised concert series and taken part in more than one hundred concerts and competitions in Italy and abroad.
He produced five monographic Vivaldi CDs for the Discoteca di Stato of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and served as choral conductor for the recording encyclopaedia KZ Musik, devoted to music composed in concentration camps between 1933 and 1945.
He was composer in residence at the Mythic Imagination Institute in Atlanta, USA. His work The Birth of Color received three performances during the Café Budapest 2016 contemporary music season, with strong responses from audiences and critics.
His activities described in the album booklet also include artistic direction of Associazione Pittura Musicale and teaching choral conducting and early music at the Conservatorio Licinio Refice in Frosinone.
Claudio Monteverdi: (b Cremona, 15 May 1567; d Venice, 29 Nov 1643). Italian composer. The most important musician in late 16th- and early 17th-century Italy, he excelled in nearly all the major genres of the period. His nine books of madrigals consolidated the achievement of the late Renaissance masters and cultivated new aesthetic and stylistic paradigms for the musical Baroque. In his operas for Mantua and Venice he took the experiments of the Florentines and developed powerful ways of expressing and structuring musical drama. His three major collections of liturgical and devotional music transcend the merely functional, exploiting a rich panoply of text-expressive and contrapuntal-structural techniques. Although he composed little or no independent instrumental music, his writing for instruments was genuinely innovative. Schrade’s famous assessment (1950) of Monteverdi as ‘creator of modern music’ may be exaggerated, but his significant place in music history is assured
Giovanni Girolamo [Giovanni Geronimo; Kapsberger, Johann Hieronymus; ‘Il Tedesco della tiorba’] Kapsperger
(b ?Venice, c1580; d Rome, Jan 1651). Italian composer, lutenist, theorbist and guitarist of German descent. (He seems to have used the spelling ‘Kapsperger’ rather than the ‘Kapsberger’ favoured by German scholars.) His father, Colonel Guglielmo Kapsperger, was a noble military official with the Imperial House of Austria and may have settled in Venice. Kapsperger was in Rome soon after 1605, where through his reputation as a virtuoso and his status as a nobile alemano he moved in the circles of powerful families such as the Bentivoglio and the Barberini. Other supporters in Rome included the Orders of S Stefano and S Giovanni and the academies of the Umoristi and the Imperfetti whose members arranged for the publication of his works; the academies Kapsperger organized in his house were described as among the ‘wonders of Rome’. Around 1609 he married the Neapolitan Gerolima di Rossi, by whom he had at least three children. In 1612 his Maggio Cantata, dedicated to the Grand duchess Maria Maddalena, was performed in Florence at the Palazzo Pitti.
Monteverdi’s madrigals of love and abandonment A brief look at the musical style of Claudio Monteverdi, who lived at the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, serving the Gonzaga family in Mantua before becoming maestro di cappella at St Mark’s in Venice, reveals a composer who, in a sense, helped invent modern music. He formulated a style known as seconda prattica, in opposition to prima prattica: the established style of liturgical music and the secular music—especially of the first half of the sixteenth century—based on the observance of…
A brief look at the musical style of Claudio Monteverdi, who lived at the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, serving the Gonzaga family in Mantua before becoming maestro di cappella at St Mark’s in Venice, reveals a composer who, in a sense, helped invent modern music. He formulated a style known as seconda prattica, in opposition to prima prattica: the established style of liturgical music and the secular music—especially of the first half of the sixteenth century—based on the observance of rules and formal patterns related to the content of the text.
The seconda prattica belongs within the debate between the ancients and the moderns, pursued with particular fervour in Florence. Its participants sought to revive the declamation of ancient Greek theatre through a modern theory of the affections, bringing music and text into complete harmony. These principles also underlay the extraordinary development of musical theatre during the seventeenth century.
The innovation of the seconda prattica lay in communicating the poetic meaning of the text through a range of chordal combinations much wider than before. It fully realised a Baroque aspiration, shared by architecture and literature: to portray—or rather bring to life—a style based on chiaroscuro, emotions and contrasts. Moods alternate through every musical means available: consonance and isorhythmic declamation, but also intensely harsh dissonances and emphatic delivery of the text in unusual rhythms.
The sestina Lagrime d’amante al sepolcro dell’amata was composed in memory of the singer Caterina Martinelli, who died in 1608 and was dear to both Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga and Monteverdi. Scipione Agnelli’s poems are Mannerist in character, and their literary value is perhaps debatable. Their construction depends on a regular permutation of six words: tomba, cielo, terra, seno, pianto and Glauco, the shepherd mourning the death of the beautiful Corinna. Musically, however, the sestina’s value is immense, thanks to the imagination of its ideas, the depth of its expression and the variety of its musical figures.
Stylistically close to the sestina, and likewise included in the Sixth Book of Madrigals, is the four-madrigal cycle Lamento d’Arianna. Here the poetic quality rests on Ottavio Rinuccini’s fine libretto. The text and the melodic line of the cantus were originally part of Arianna, a tragedia per musica performed in Mantua in 1608. The opera is lost apart from its celebrated lament.
Two madrigals from the Eighth Book complete the programme and present a different stylistic character. Monteverdi directs that they be sung “a voce piena, alla francese”, referring to a full sonority and the continual alternation between the cantus and the vocal quintet.
Album Notes by Lucio Ivaldi. English revised against the original Italian text.
Consort Vocale Diapente: Sara Della Porta, cantus; Paola Ronchetti, quintus; Daniele Pellegrini, altus; Gianmatteo Busacca, tenor; Amleto Luciano Massa, bassus. Francesco Tomasi, theorbo and the instrumental solos by Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger. Lucio Ivaldi, director.
Recorded on 18–19 September 2008 at the Auditorium dell’Istituto Centrale per i Beni Sonori ed Audiovisivi, Rome. Printed with support from Associazione Pittura Musicale and S.P.L.M. Design, art direction and production: Osaka Mozart Association. Copyright in the sound recording and artwork: Osaka Mozart Association. ℗ and © Da Vinci Classics. DDD. Manufactured in Japan.
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