The career of conductor
Rinaldo Alessandrini is a testimony to his rigor as a scholar and his flexibility and sensitivity as a musician. A case in point is his treatment of Monteverdi, a composer whose music underwent seismic developments between his early career as a Renaissance madrigalist and his Venetian operas written in the mid-seventeenth century.
Alessandrini's attention to authentic performance practice is evident in the comparison of his recording of Orfeo, Monteverdi's first opera, written in 1607, and his fifth Book of Madrigals, published just two years earlier. Both are examples of Monteverdi's use of the seconda prattica, based on the revolutionary premise that the emotional content of the text must control the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic movement of the music. The music is declaimed in patterns that more realistically evoke natural patterns of speech, and in order for the text to be clearly understood, is less rigorously controlled by contrapuntal correctness and complexity than that of the prima prattica.
Alessandrini's recording of Orfeo on Naïve is a model of rhythmic freedom and dynamism, as is appropriate for the radical new form of opera. Madrigals were considered a more formal genre than opera, and his recording of the fifth Book of Madrigals is respectful of the early seventeenth century conventions of madrigal singing. This required a more restrained range of rhythmic flexibility, allowing the composer's melodic lines and newly free use of dissonance to convey more of the emotional content of the text than a naturalistic declamation of the words.
Alessandrini's interpretations of the madrigals balance the roles of melody, harmony, and rhythm in fully persuasive performances that faithfully honor the conventions so important to the composer; the melodies are lovingly and gracefully shaped; the astonishing, often revolutionary dissonances are delivered with just the right force to draw attention to them without distorting the music; and the rhythms are supple and ideally elastic. The performers of
Concerto Italiano have pure, warm voices and sing with a gorgeous blend. They treat the madrigals as the miniature dramas that they are, and sing with intensity and passion. Naïve's sound is clean, vibrant, and intimate, perfectly suited for this repertoire.