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 ...
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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...
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