Lovers of the age of early opera may go scurrying for the reference books or sites when they see the unfamiliar name of Francesco Rasi on this innovative release from the consistently hip French label Naïve. The solution to the puzzlement is that Rasi was primarily a singer, not a composer, although some madrigals attributed to him from a 1610 collection survive and are recorded here. Musically Rasi was closely involved in the landmarks of opera's first decade, appearing in Jacopo Peri's Euridice (1600), the starting point ...
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Lovers of the age of early opera may go scurrying for the reference books or sites when they see the unfamiliar name of Francesco Rasi on this innovative release from the consistently hip French label Naïve. The solution to the puzzlement is that Rasi was primarily a singer, not a composer, although some madrigals attributed to him from a 1610 collection survive and are recorded here. Musically Rasi was closely involved in the landmarks of opera's first decade, appearing in Jacopo Peri's Euridice (1600), the starting point if you have to pick one out, and playing the lead in the premiere performance of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Mantua in 1607. His personal career was more like Carlo Gesualdo's, only worse; he and the young wife of his stepmother's attendant strangled the stepmother in the course of a robbery that netted only a few coins, six gold rings, and some silverware. (Music-loving patrons protected him, and he was able to keep performing although he was sentenced to death by hanging and...
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