Search - Claudio Monteverdi, Concerto delle Dame di Ferrara :: Monteverdi: Canzonette

Love songs from a talented seventeen year old

12/13/1998

(3 out of 5 stars)

"These Canzonette are Monteverdi's earliest secular works. His previous two collections having been church music; the Sacrae cantiunculae for 3 voices of 1582, and the Madrigali spirituali a 4 of 1583. These are lightweight works, as you would expect, but not childish by any means. Monteverdi is already showing artful word play, and the thin booklet gives a few examples. What it doesn't give, which is unforgiveable, is texts - although the canzonette are by minor poets the words are still the whole point here, and the listener's Italian will need to be pretty fluent to pick up what the composer is saying in the interplay between lyric and music. As a consolation this CD is packed to the limit; Playing time 78'01."