The album Daylight is a successor to a similar release from 2017 that offered Monteverdi pieces unified by nocturnal themes. Concerto Italiano director Rinaldo Alessandrini suggests that the two albums are best appreciated together. It's not a bad idea, if only because both are compelling, but one can fully enjoy Alessandrini's innovations from this release alone. Both albums combine madrigals and related works, arias from operas and the Scherzi musicali, and instrumental pieces, with a heavy admixture of dance rhythms in both instrumental and vocal works. After a short Sinfonia from the opera Orfeo, the program opens with Non si levana ancor l'alba novella, from Monteverdi's madrigals of Book Two, which depicts a Romeo and Juliet pair of lovers trying to hold back the dawn. Things proceed naturally with other texts about the daylight, with peppy dances, and with tales of shepherds and shepherdesses, the conventional language of romance and sex during the early Renaissance. The album is a lot of fun for anybody, and those who follow recordings of Monteverdi closely will also be intrigued; the idea of putting diverse materials together in a single program is fresh enough that Alessandrini takes pains to warn purists. He needn't have; an audience of Monteverdi's time would have found this program much more natural than a performance that plowed woodenly through a book of madrigals. Alessandrini's five singers are highly engaging, and the sound is exemplary, recorded in the Sala della Carità in Padua, a wooden-ceilinged small space that fits the music marvelously.