Editorial Reviews

With this disc, Harmonia Mundi's Century: A History of Music series moves onto what sports fans might call its home field: the Harmonia Mundi catalog is heavily stocked with discs by artists who have brought the music of the seventeenth century to life, and several of them, notably Les Arts Florissants and its Buffalo-to-Paris-transplanted leader William Christie, are represented here. What the packaging rightly calls the "revolution" accomplished during the Italian Baroque was first and foremost a matter of vocal music. The disc traces both the emergence of the principle of harmony in the intimate, aristocratic madrigal genre, at the hands of Monteverdi and his fellow travelers, and the growth of more public opera and its characteristic forms, offering performances that will be evocative to newcomers even in spite of the lamentable lack of text translations (buyers could at the very least have been directed to translations on a website). The excerpt from Cavalli's "Seneca i suoi famigliari" given here is beautiful enough to make permanent converts to early Baroque opera. After interludes examining sacred genres and the development of the sonata and concerto instrumental genres that still flourish today, the disc closes with Handel's Italian opera seria, the full flowering of the art as it had developed over the preceding century. The map inside the front cover is as close as can be imagined to a graphic representation of the prime role Italian music played during the Baroque, and the newcomer question-and-answer format of the notes (in French and English) supports the selections chosen for inclusion on the disc. The riches of seventeenth century music aren't always immediately accessible to new listeners to classical music, but this collection makes a perfect stepping-stone. James Manheim, All Music Guide

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