It's difficult to figure out from the cover, or from Internet images, what all is going on in this fine release by Montreal's Les Voix Baroques and Consort Les Voix Humaines. Even the booklet doesn't help much, going into great detail about a semi-theatrical comic work from 1604 by Monteverdi's contemporary Orazio Vecchi; only two small sections of the work are recorded here. Instead, the musicians use Vecchi as a springboard for a program of early Baroque vocal and instrumental pieces whose organization parallels that of a ...
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It's difficult to figure out from the cover, or from Internet images, what all is going on in this fine release by Montreal's Les Voix Baroques and Consort Les Voix Humaines. Even the booklet doesn't help much, going into great detail about a semi-theatrical comic work from 1604 by Monteverdi's contemporary Orazio Vecchi; only two small sections of the work are recorded here. Instead, the musicians use Vecchi as a springboard for a program of early Baroque vocal and instrumental pieces whose organization parallels that of a scene in the Vecchi work: a group of guests at a Carnival banquet begin to do imitations of accents and behaviors of people from various nations. The result is a set of pieces from the early years of the seventeenth century, divided into national schools or "humors." Germany is "martial," France "comic," Italy "light," and England "melancholic," with the whole thing framed by a pair of Vecchi's madrigals and a short processional piece by Giovanni Gastoldi. On top of all this, most...
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