Grupo Vocal Alegría 4: 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 Two

The second ‘Libro dei Madrigali a cinque voci’ was published in the year 1590, when the composer was just 22 years old. In his second book, he uses a significant number of poems by Torcuato Tasso.

This book provides a sonorous setting for an experimental and dreamlike piece (Duermevela – Visual arts essay on melancholy based on Monteverdi’s book 2) that triggers our collective imagination around the subject of melancholy. A woman who is dropping off to sleep (duermevela), on that frontier between wakefulness and sleep where memories and sensations are more easily twisted, counts sheep as a remedy against her despair. We enter her mind, in a collage of images tinged with black bile that mix beauty and darkness, humour and strangeness. The woman only finds the love of which Monteverdi speaks in her most faithful lover, sadness.