With Claudio Cavina having also recorded a later Venetian opera for Glossa in Francesco Cavalli’s Artemisia, this is an ideal time to speak to the conductor (but who also takes a singing role as Human Frailty in Ulisse) about his views on Monteverdi’s great musical tale from La Serenissima.
Cavina supports the notion that not all of Ulisse may have been written by Monteverdi yet we are still left with a convincing demonstration of that composer’s dramatic skill and imagination – the more so when singers such as Anicio Zorzi Giustiniani (second photograph) as Ulysses and Josè Maria La Monaco as Penelope (third photograph)are representing the forces of constancy and virtue from this Homeric story. Along the way, Claudio Cavina has developed a ‘sixth sense’ for recognizing and interpreting Monteverdi’s style and the result, in this new recording made in Mondovì in Italy, captures perfectly the spirit of the fledgling Venetian operatic world which Monteverdi was helping to encourage. which, of course, has taken in along its way the madrigals, L’Orfeo, L’incoronazione di Poppea, the Selva morale e spirituale and the ensemble’s own modern and popular ‘twist’ on the Cremonese genius in ’Round M – now comes to rest on Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, the penultimate surviving dramatic work by Monteverdi, which was given its first performance in the Venice Carnival of 1640. The remarkable journey of Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana through and with the music of Claudio Monteverdi.
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