Lovers of the age of early opera may go scurrying for the reference books or sites when they see the unfamiliar name of
Francesco Rasi on this innovative release from the consistently hip French label Naïve. The solution to the puzzlement is that
Rasi was primarily a singer, not a composer, although some madrigals attributed to him from a 1610 collection survive and are recorded here. Musically
Rasi was closely involved in the landmarks of opera's first decade, appearing in
Jacopo Peri's Euridice (1600), the starting point if you have to pick one out, and playing the lead in the premiere performance of
Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Mantua in 1607. His personal career was more like
Carlo Gesualdo's, only worse; he and the young wife of his stepmother's attendant strangled the stepmother in the course of a robbery that netted only a few coins, six gold rings, and some silverware. (Music-loving patrons protected him, and he was able to keep performing although he was sentenced to death by hanging and quartering.) The program is not so much a historical reconstruction, although perhaps a celebrated singer at an Italian ducal court around 1610 could have performed a selection like this. Instead it is thematic, and as such it's quite useful for those who want to get deeper into the roots of early opera and the
Monteverdi style. The pieces are madgrials and operatic excerpts, accompanied by a small string group, and the music consists of the free declamation known as monody. The texts of the solo madrigals of the period can seem very conventional to the casual listener, with their endless pastoral parade of shepherds and shepherdesses pining away, but baritone
Furio Zanasi and the Italian early music trio
La Chimera try to break the conventions down and bring them alive. The album consists of three sections, "Amor che deggio far," dealing with desire; "Vedrò il mio sol," which is about Orpheus and relates to the album's title; and "Vattene por crudel," pertaining to the torments of impossible love. Along the way are plenty of unusual pieces that leave the listener more attuned to the ways composers of the time heard Italian pastoral poetry. Note the last piece,
Antonio Brunelli's Non havea Febo ancora, for which there also exists a somber setting by
Monteverdi. This one is almost breezy, and annotator
Philippe Canguilhem (notes are in French and English) suggests that with it
Rasi might have been thumbing his nose at the prosecution team. At any rate, this is a fine collection illuminating early monody and the life of the mighty courts that gave it birth.