Luogo e data di registrazione		- Friedrich-Ebert-Halle, Hamburg-Harburg (Germania) - aprile 1971 (Monteverdi) - Plenarsaal der Akademie der Wissenschaften, München (Germania - marzo 1975
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Andreas Holschneider - Gerd Ploebsch (Monteverdi) - Heinz Wildhagen / Klaus Hiemann (Monteverdi) - Heinz Wildhagen
	Prima Edizione LP		- Archiv - 2533 087 - (1 lp) - durata 52' 30" - (p) 1972 - Analogico - (Monteverdi - parziale) - Archiv - 2533 305 - (1 lp) - durata 48' 37" - (p) 1975 - Analogico - (intero)
	Edizione "Collectio" CD		Archiv - 437 075-2 - (1 cd) - durata 73' 44" - (c) 1986 - ADD
	Note		-

NEW SONGS FOR OLD In 1602 the virtuoso tenor Giulio Caccini published a collection of songs for voice and basso continuo with the banner-waving title Le nuove musiche. Caccini sought to impress the world - and also his employer, the Grand Duke of Tuscany - with what he claimed were entirely new styles of solo song and solo singing. Of course, this “new music” was scarcely new; but for all his unacknowledged debts to earlier traditions, Caccini may have had a point. He said that he was answering recent humanist objections, made in Florence and elsewhere, that the prevalent musical style of the Renaissance - contrapuntal writing for several voices - only confused both the words and the emotions that music was intended to arouse; hence the use of a single voice supported by an instrument and the presentation of the text in a declamatory, affective manner. No less important was the displaying of the talents of the new breed of singer-virtuoso at his (sometimes her) technical and expressive best. Le nuove musiche contains both madrigals and arias. The distinction was primarily poetic - aria texts are stophic - although it also had musical implications. Thus Caccini writes serious through-composed declamatory madrigals alongside lighter songs which are more rhythmically and melodically conceived and often in a dance-like triple time: “Perfidissimo volto” and “Belle rose porporine” (madrigal and aria respectively) are representative. The success of these new styles and techniques was such that over 80 collections containing solo songs had been published by 1620. Some were by the greatest virtuosos of the age: Francesco Rasi, who took the title-role in Monteverdi’s first opera, Orfeo (1607), is a prime example. Others catered for the domestic market, where less extravagant idioms were the order of the day: the fine collection of Madrigali et arie (1617) by Vincenzo Calestani from Pisa - it also includes pieces by Florentine musicians such as Giovanni del Turco - was expressly written for the young noblewoman Isabella Malespini-Mastiani. But a few of these volumes were by composers with more serious pretensions who may have felt that Caccini had subverted the noble aims of the “new music” with his rather facile style. For example, Caccini’s rival at the Medici court, Jacopo Peri, made few concessions to virtuosity and sought, in his madrigals at least, a style thoroughly faithful to their serious texts by the leading poets of the age. The trend continued in the works of composers no less skilled in writing “old”-style polyphonic madrigals. Marco da Gagliano and Sigismondo d’India had several fine madrigal books to their name, and they brought to the solo song much-needed expressive and structural techniques honed within the polyphonic tradition. This in turn granted the solo song a solidity and expressive power somewhat lacking in songbooks by musicians who were more singers than composers. Sigismondo d’India’s “Cruda Amarilli, che col nome ancora” exploits dissonances and harmonic structures that would not be out of place in a polyphonic madrigal (indeed, it draws on d’India’s own five-voice setting of the poem published in 1606). As a result, the solo madrigal begins to parallel its polyphonic counterpart, rather than standing in opposition to it. The rather wayward songs of Claudio Saracini, a noble amateur from Siena, display the chromaticism and rhythmic irregularities typical of the no less wayward polyphonic madrigals of Gesualdo, as music enters a Mannerist phase. Unlike Gagliano and d’India, Claudio Monteverdi had little truck with writing for solo voice, at least outside his operas. One problem with the “new music” for professional composers - and Monteverdi was the greatest of his generation - was the fear of jettisoning musical skills granted by tradition and developed by years of hard work. Caccini claimed that he had learned more from his humanist friends than from three decades of studying counterpoint, but many who really had studied counterpoint for that length of time saw little advantage in denying a musical heritage that was still an effective measure of musical worth. Monteverdi, a musician at the court of the Duke of Mantua and from 1613 head of the prestigious musical establishment of St. Mark’s basilica in Venice, trod cautiously. Certainly he was aware of newer trends: “Mentre vaga Angioletta”, from his Eighth Book of Madrigals of 1638, is a fine illustration of - perhaps a satire on - virtuosic vocal techniques. But even when the pull of the “new music” became irresistible - and Monteverdi was certainly sympathetic to its aesthetic roots - he sought to retain the best of the “old” style, in part by writing for more than one voice; he explored different combinations of three voices for a time (for example two tenors and bass), but the duet seems to have become his preferred combination. The lessons are clear in his Seventh Book of Madrigals (1617) - with the modern title Concerto - then his Scherzi musicali (1632), the magnificent Eighth Book, headed Madrigali guerrieri, et rzmorosi (“Madrigals of War and Love”), and the posthumously published Ninth Book (1651). All offer fine examples of emerging Baroque musical styles. In “Vaga su spina ascosa” (Seventh Book) Monteverdi takes a rather facile aria text by Gabriello Chiabrera and constructs an impressive - and significantly, through-composed - musical edifice. “Se vittorie sì belle” (Eighth Book) is a splendid duet counterpointing the images of the book’s title, war and love (of course, two sides of the same coin), with the strident rhythms and martial fanfares of his newly coined stile concitato (the “agitated style”). The duet “Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti” (from the Scherzi musicali) perhaps best reveals Monteverdi’s subversion of newer trends for expressive ends. Here the clichés of the triple-time aria are applied to a highly literary sonnet (by Ottavio Rinuccini), with a bouncy melody played off against (at the end) plangent dissonances to contrast the joys of spring with the pains of love. No less radical, while not unprecedented, is the repeating cadential figure (the “ciaccona” pattern) used as a ground bass. Add the overtly imitative musical gestures (for “mountains”, “valleys”, “murmuring stream”, etc.) so often used for word-painting in the polyphonic madrigal, and the result is a striking fusion of old and new that is in turn Monteverdi’s remarkable contribution to a remarkable period in the history of Western music. Tim Carter