Monteverdi: Vespro della beata Vergine [Double Album]

InALTO, directed by cornettist Lambert Colson, brings Monteverdi’s monumental 1610 Vespers to life on the historic 1565 Antegnati organ of the Basilica Palatina di Santa Barbara in Mantua — the very court where Monteverdi served as maestro di cappella and, by his own account, first conceived this landmark publication as a bid to escape the duke’s demanding service. The recording restores the collection’s full liturgical apparatus: the psalms and hymn built on static cantus firmi set against Monteverdi’s dazzlingly elaborate polyphony, the intimate sacri concentus (Nigra sum, Pulchra es, Duo Seraphim, Audi coelum) that trace an implicit Marian theology, and the celebrated two-choir Magnificat with its uniquely specified organ registrations and instrumentation.

Framed by Claudio Merulo’s Toccata, Giovanni Gabrieli’s Canzon Septimi et Octavi Toni, and a Palestrina motet, and interwoven with Gregorian antiphons sung by the Cappella di San Petronio di Bologna, the album reconstructs a plausible full Vespers service for a Marian feast — grounded in decades of scholarship into a print long misunderstood by earlier generations of musicologists. Recorded at the Basilica di Santa Barbara in Mantua, on the same organ Monteverdi himself would have known, this is a Vespers steeped in its original architectural and liturgical context.

InALTO
Lambert Colson – director