For many years now, Swiss soprano Claudine Ansermet (nothing to do with the orchestra leader) has given over her talent to the music of the Italian Renaissance and early baroque. She had already made a start on the music of Sigismondo d'India, in an album published by Lyrinx in 1984 with the Hoc Pus ensemble. Of course, her voice has changed now, there is more vibrato, but her interest in this super-expressive music remains the same as ever.
Probably born in Palermo at the end of the 16th century, Sigismondo d'India sits at the threshold separating the last of the Renaissance and the start of the baroque era which flourished in Mantua, and in Venice with Claudio Monteverdi. Leaving his native Sicily, he turns up in the north of the Italian peninsula, at court in Turin, in the chapel of the Duke of Savoy, and then later in Modena and Rome. We don't know a lot about him, but one can easily spot the influence of Carlo Gesualdo in his music. His First Book of Madrigals (he wrote six), published in 1606, is dedicated to Vincent Gonzague who was Monteverdi's protector in Mantua. With his dramatic chromaticism and complex harmonies, he is every bit the successor to Gesualdo, and indeed one of the only artists to pick up the latter's torch; and likewise, he is a successor to Monteverdi. His art represents the last word on the madrigal, which was soon to be replaced by opera. This new album from Claudine Ansermet, with the Milanese lutist Paolo Cherici, is given over to d'India's Lamenti, but also other composers of his time, like Alessandro Piccinini and Kapsberger. Here is a music of desperation, melancholy and black bile.
© François Hudry/Qobuz