Euskalbarrokensemble: Madrigales de Claudio Monteverdi

Claudio Giovanni Monteverdi (Cremona, 1567 – Venice 1643). He is the most important figure in the transition between the music of the Renaissance and the Baroque. He also composed what is considered to be the first opera ever written, Orpheus.

As a composer of madrigals, he published 8 books, of which the first 4 will be performed in 2017 in different formats to mark the 450th anniversary of his birth. His compositions combine harmonies and dissonances beautifully with exquisite and suggestive results.

Book Three

The ‘Terzo Libro dei Madrigali a cinque voci’ was published in Mantua in 1592, and gave the composer his first taste of success. It featured texts based on poems by Torcuato Tasso and Gian Battista Guarini.

Monteverdi’s third book of Madrigals reflects the affectation and temperament of the purest tradition of Italian Madrigal style in the 16^th Century, but with the subtle difference that the text itself has become increasingly more important, something that is seen even more clearly in the fourth book. The primacy of the text is one of the characteristics of the “Seconda pratica” (a term coined by Monteverdi), which was seen in the years following the publication of the third book, accompanied by a kind of musical audacity that was completely new at the time.

This musical conception predicted the burgeoning operatic style and was set within the early Baroque, a style that saw in the creation of the basso continuo one of its most defining and determining musical expressions in the harmonic/musical concept of future European music.