Everything about the presentation of this album of Monteverdi madrigals is intimidating. The print is punishingly small. There is no tracklist. The provided translations of its central work, Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (The Combat of Tancredi and Clorinda), into English and French are those of Monteverdi's day (what does "dight" mean?), not modern ones. And the analysis of that piece delves into how it fulfills Aristotelian precepts of drama -- doubtless interesting for specialists, but far less useful for the average listener than knowing something of the work's origins. (Written for a Venetian nobleman, likely for a wedding festivity, it is thus a descendant of the giant outdoor wedding intermedi of the Medicis that helped give birth to modern dramatic music itself, and it would have involved dancing and set design as well as singing). Everything is intimidating, that is, until you hear the music, which is hyperexpressive and grabs you right from the start with intense rhythms, percussive articulation of fast passages, and operatically conceived laments. The Lamento della ninfa (Lament of the Nymph), track 3, has rarely received such an emotional performance, but the real chef d'oeuvre is Il Combattimento, which comes last, and toward which the mixture of madrigals from Monteverdi's seventh and eighth books seems to build inexorably. The Torquato Tasso dramatic poem on which this 20-minute piece is based provides a field day for feminist and postcolonialist scholarship with its story of a Crusader knight who encounters the Saracen princess Clorinda on the battlefield, stabs her between the breasts after an epic struggle, and succeeds in converting her to Christianity and baptizing her with a helmet full of water as she dies. Monteverdi's setting is cited in the history books for its introduction of pizzicato and tremolo to the Western musical vocabulary, but that's not all there is to it -- the Ensemble Akadêmia, the two soloists (Jan van Elsacker as Tancredi and
Guillemette Laurens as Clorinda), and conductor
Françoise Lassere get closer than perhaps any previous performance to the way the composer pulled out all the stops here, to the shock it must have held for its first hearers as soloists suddenly took over for the narrator, as sounds of horses' hooves rang out from the little orchestra, as the action rose into violence and settled back into exquisitely spun-out stretches of repose and exhaustion. The texts printed in the booklet reproduce Monteverdi's directions to the musicians in his manuscript, and these often help the listener envision the work's original visual aspect. Though this release goes beyond even other Monteverdi madrigal recordings that take an intense approach, it doesn't go too far, for Monteverdi was all about the shock of the new. Highly recommended.