Monteverdi: Vespro della beata Vergine (1610) (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin 'Marian Vespers')

This path-breaking early digital recording of the 1610 Vespers remains a benchmark and a favourite whenever versions of this work come up for consideration.

Andrew Parrott’s starting-point was that the music was written for a Marian Vespers, and is therefore best heard in its liturgical context. So we have the appropriate plainchant antiphon before each psalm, and other chant required by liturgy.

Just as vital was the question of pitch. Parrott was the first conductor to confront, and eventually solve, the problem posed by the apparent higher pitch of the Magnificat and the Lauda Ierusalem. Read correctly, and following a convention that was well understood at the time, the music is here performed a 4th below written pitch. The arguments are arcane but unanswerable. Before Parrott’s example, fully a quarter of the Vespers was always performed in a sort ‘stratospheric scramble’.

Last but not least, this is music in the concertato style, for highly skilled soloists. Here, rather than the anachronistic modern convention that has certain sections ‘full choir’ and only the more intricate passages given to soloists, each part is in general sung by a single voice, as Monteverdi intended. The lines become clearer, the solo voices combine and answer one another with a marvellous flexibility and expressiveness.

The couplings are taken from a 1982 disc of Venetian vesper music, some of which has not reappeared since that first issue.

Awards: FFFF de Télérama, Caecilia Prijs (Belgium)