Recorded in 1987, this album was one of the milestones in the early music rediscovery of Claudio Monteverdi's music. It has been reissued several times and has held up well despite a general trend toward a gutsier, more dramatic quality in performing Monteverdi's later madrigal books -- the accompaniment from
Anthony Rooley's
Consort of Musicke is chamber-sized, and the general atmosphere is intimate.
Emma Kirkby and
Evelyn Tubb, veterans of the English early music scene, were at the peak of their powers when this album was released, and they make a superb team. The booklet points out that, for a body of music generally thought of as soloistic, Monteverdi's later madrigal books and his sacred music of the same period (the album is divided between sacred and secular works) tend to favor the vocal duet, in which dissonances between the two voices could be added to the large vocabulary of rhetorical effects available in the single monodic line.
Kirkby and
Tubb catch the subtleties of Monteverdi's expressive language as well as more recent interpreters do; if they do not seem consumed by grief or passion, they do shape duets like Non e gentil core into exquisite, ethereal trails of song. Each singer gets one long secular lament and one sacred solo song, with
Tubb's Lamento di Penelope (from the late opera Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria) an especially well-managed standout. There is nothing wrong with the remastering of the 1987 sound, but its church locale lent it a rather chilly quality in the first place. The bottom line: sample some newer performances of this music, but in the end you'll want to settle into awe-insping opening chain of dissonances in Ohimé, dov'é il mio ben, dov'é il mio core and listen to them over and over again.