Monika Groop & Petteri Salomaa & Helsinki Baroque Orchestra - Monteverdi: Lamento D'arianna (CD)

Release Date: 01/01/04

At the beginning of the 17th centul)', music was suddenly awash with new form and feeling. The gradual emergence of inst

At the beginning of the 17th centul)', music was suddenly awash with new form and feeling. The gradual emergence of instrumental music as a genre in its own right heralded the advent of sonatas and fantasies both wild and virtuosic. In vocal music, the licence now permitted in poetry and the new means of expression combined in a way that was decisive not only for the nascent Baroque era but for the progress of all Western music towards an independent form of art. Out of the Renaissance madrigal grew a categol)' of artistic composition the influence of which also extended to liturgical chant, and in which burning love, tormented longing, the shadow of death and ecstatic happiness were inextricably interwoven. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) studied what he called his prima prattica, a method of composition inherited from the old Flemish masters of polyphony, but at the same time paved the way for a seconda prattica, a musical revolution that charged both secular and sacred works with poweiful emotion and lent them structures familiar from instrumental music. In so doing he shifted the focus of music to the feeling, affective human being.The presence of emotion was most pronounced in his operas, of which Ariadne, peiformed in 1608, has unfortunately been lost. The widely copied and imitated Lamento d'Arianna has, however, survived and is a heartrending account by the Cretan princess rejected byTheseus. The text by Ottavio Rinuccini paints a classic picture of a noble woman bowed down by sorrow and ready to leave this world. - Aapo Häkkinen