Carissimi: Historia di Jephte. Motets explores the intimate world of early Baroque vocal music, centered on the expressive dialogue between voice and plucked strings. Built around seventeenth-century Italian repertoire, the program unfolds as a dramatic and rhetorical journey through love, longing, devotion and lament — hallmarks of the emerging seconda pratica aesthetic.

The album highlights the refined interplay between solo voices and lute/theorbo, where text expression governs musical gesture. Recitative passages move freely and speech-like, while arioso and dance-inflected sections provide contrast and momentum. Ornamentation is handled with stylistic sensitivity, reinforcing the emotional rhetoric without overshadowing the poetic text.

Particular emphasis is placed on the timbral clarity of the plucked continuo instrument, whose transparent resonance allows harmonic color and subtle rhythmic flexibility to shape the vocal line. The recording captures the intimacy of chamber performance, preserving natural acoustics and detailed articulation.

Rather than presenting the repertoire as museum reconstruction, the performers approach it as living theatre: each piece unfolds as a miniature scena, balancing stylized restraint with spontaneous expressivity. The result is both historically informed and emotionally immediate.

This album offers a refined portrait of early Italian vocal art — music poised between Renaissance polyphony and the emerging Baroque language — where intimacy, rhetorical clarity and expressive nuance define the aesthetic.

Voces Suaves
Michele Vannelli, Direction