Luogo e data di registrazione		Christ-König-Kirche, Hamburg-Lokstedt (Germany) - 6-10 Aprile 1963
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Wolf Erichson
	Engineer		Dieter Thomsen
	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9438-A (Stereo) - AWT 9438-A (Mono) | 1 LP - durata 43' 30" | (p) 1964 | ANA Telefunken "Reference" | 6.41185 AQ | 1 LP - durata 43' 30" | (p) 1982 | ANA | Riedizione
	Edizione CD		Teldec Classics "Das Alte Werk | LC 6019 | 4509-93268-2 | 1 CD - durata 43' 30" | (c) 2001 | ADD
	Cover		Claudio Monteverdi, Gemälde eines unbekannten Meisters, (Landesmuseum Innsbruck).
	Note		-

Claudio Monteverdi’s music stands on the threshold of a new age, bearing within itself the heritage of the past just as much as it looks forward into the future. In it, the new instrumental spirit meets the mainly vocal musical mentality that had come down from the sixteenth century, the instrumental style speaking out in terms of tone and harmony as against the largely linear polyphony that had preceded it. At this stage in its development, music had become ripe for the depiction of Man, his emotions and behaviour; opera came into being, its first outstanding specimen being Monteverdi’s ,,Orfeo“. The same tension between two poles dominates Monteverdi’s non-dramatic music too. The collaboration of vocal and instrumental elements led to the idea of concerted performance, and indeed Monteverdi progammatically called his Seventh Madrigal Book of 1619 ,,Concerto“. Concerted madrigals (this description emphasizes the connexion with the sixteenth century) can allready be found introducing the new style in his Fifth and Sixth Books (1606 and 1614). In the nine-part “Questi vaghi concenti”, a Sinfonia (partly repeated) is contrasted with a development of vocal tone that recalls the Venetian tradition of writing for two or more choirs, although the instrumental bass already enters into a constructive relationship with the vocal parts in the solo sections. “Presso un fiume tranquillo” and “A Dio, Florida bella” apply the concerto principle to the singing with and against each other of a narrating and a commenting choir and of a pair of lovers in dialogue. In the reproduction of the sparkling language, so rich in emotional contrasts, of these two poems by Giambattista Marino, the music attains a powerful dynamic quality. The typical features of the situations, thematic material and poetical and musical expression are reminiscent of the early operas of that time. The predominant setting in both cases is that pastoral world symbolic of a Golden Age into which the early 17th century, threatened both spiritually and physically, projected its yearnings, its dreams and its sufferings. The line “O memoria felice o lieto giorno” in Marino’s “Qui rise, o Tirsi” gives typical expression to this mood. Monteverdi treats it as an emphatic choral refrain, the individual features of pastoral life being realistically depicted in eloquent little musical motifs. The canzonetta “Amor che deggio far” from the Seventh Book has been conceived entirely for solo performance. The concerto concept here pervades the whole of the work’s structure, various ritornelli that are nevertheless related to each other as variations being heard in alternation with the individual sung verses. The melodious verses are sung by one to four voices, the ritornelli being dominated by that agile vidin playing so characteristic of Monteverdi’s later writing. Both ritornelli and verses move over a bass that remains the same in each case, thus creating a striking unity in the work. In the Eighth Book, “Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi”, which Monteverdi published in 1638, in the middle of the Thirty Years War, the concerto principle is extended to express the universal driving forces of love and war.. “Altri canti d’amor” depicts the murmurings of love, but throws them aside quickly and invokes the harder strains of the times. In this large-scale composition Monteverdi employs all the means at his disposal, from the solo voice to the twelve part vocal and instrumental ensemble, in order to fulfil an impressive, richly contrasted act of musical homage to the Emperor Ferdinand II. Runs, triad motifs and note repetitions provide particularly illuminating examples of that “concitato genere” with which Monteverdi - as he writes in the preface to the Eighth Book - complemented the possibilities of expression in music of human emotions. The new approach to composition finds its most comprehensive realization among the pieces recorded here in a purely poetic, completely timeless creation: the first part of Petrarch’s sonnet “Hor che'l ciel e la terra”. Opposing fields of tonality, gestures that clash with one another, varying sequences of tone-colour and mood are weighed up against each other and united in a broad, sweeping whole; they authentically transform the structure and content of the verses into music. Wolfgang Osthoff