It has taken Rinaldo Alessandrini and his faithful group of singers and instrumentalists 28 years to complete their survey of Monteverdi madrigals. Instalments have appeared intermittently since the late 1990s, a sequence punctuated by Concerto Italiano’s other recording projects, and at one point interrupted by the temporary disappearance of the Naive label itself. The final recordings, of the first book and the ninth (which was only published eight years after the composer’s death yet includes Zefiro Torna, one of his greatest settings) were made in 2021 and 2020 respectively. Those appear for the first time in this complete set; for anyone who has been collecting the series assiduously as it has appeared, that final instalment is also being released as a single disc.
Since Alessandrini began his project at least two other complete recordings of these inexhaustibly beguiling pieces have been completed – there is Delitiae Musicae’s series on Naxos and, more importantly, La Venexiana’s for Glossa, which is the one that comes closer to rivalling Concerto Italiano’s for its wondrously precise attention to detail and to the exact weighting of every syllable. Both sets demonstrate yet again that native Italian speakers have a precious advantage in tackling these settings; it’s hard to choose between them, both are outstanding achievements.
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