NON È DI GENTIL CORE

Monica Piccinini and Anna Simboli are lead by Rinaldo Alessandrini into an early 17th-century Venetian parlour, for an intense concert of arias and madrigals from Monteverdi’s Seventh Book of Madrigals (1619) and Scherzi musicali (1632), both collections written in Venice after his leave from the Gonzaga court. At the time, the Republic of Venice was the town of the cultural and political innovation, fashionable and fond of the Carnival season: that mood and atmosphere is perfectly mirrored in the experimental language, so free and daring, of Monteverdi’s madrigals.