Vox Luminis, Monteverdi's Vespers for the Blessed Virgin

The Vespers of the Blessed Virgin (1610) by Claudio Monteverdi are so much more than an ecclesiastical evening prayer. The maestro of the San Marco starts from the traditional vesper recipe – a combination of psalms, hymns, and canticles – but transforms it into a sound spectacle of the highest order. Opera and liturgy, old and new, pious and sensual: everything collides and melts into one grandiose design. The score breathes the space of the basilica in which Monteverdi designed the sound of the future, as if the graceful galleries, balconies, and choir stalls inspired the sound architecture. Monteverdi is brilliant with voices but also uses cornetti, trombones, strings, organ, and continuo – not as decorative elements, but as colors on a palette. Some passages are monumental, others sober and narrative or explicitly virtuosic. In this masterful labyrinth, it is good to linger with Vox Luminis: a collective of sound perfectionists with their heads in the sources and their hearts on their tongues.