This programme is built around the vocal and instrumental music of Michelangelo Rossi and takes an original approach: to present this exceptional work in dialogue with that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Rather than presenting Rossi's work as a monolithic ensemble, La Camerata Chromatica wishes to help audiences discover the great musical, poetic and stylistic variety of its origins. Faced with such an exceptional repertoire, the ensemble seeks to reveal the sources of its unlikely historical flowering.

Rossi's stylistic devices were widely shared by various local traditions throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy: Milan (with Giuseppe Caimo), Palermo (with Gioan Pietro Del Buono), Rome (with Sigismondo d'India and Domenico Mazzocchi), and above all Naples (with Carlo Gesualdo, Scipione Lacorcia and Ettore Della Marra).

In this programme, these composers are represented by their most striking masterpieces, in a kaleidoscope of extreme emotions: the accusatory rage of d'India, the desperate languor of Della Marra, the sacred revolt of a powerless mother in Mazocchi, an imprecation on the human condition in Caimo, or the violence of amorous despair in Gesualdo.

Michelangelo Rossi's madrigals are without equal in the entire vocal repertoire of the 17th century, across all of Europe. They represent one of the last examples of chromatic music in the polyphonic style of the Renaissance, and can be considered the apotheosis of this great musical movement. These vocal works are like a dark crystal, an unequalled condensation of everything that was most experimental in their time: using all the expressive tools newly invented in the 'contemporary music' of his time, Rossi concentrates the emotions of the poem in his music to saturation point, leaving us with psychedelic and overwhelming works.

Program