Sir John Eliot Gardiner - Monteverdi: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, SV 325 (2018) [CD Rip]

Monteverdi’s great opera is a celebration of unwavering devotion, conveyed in some of the composer’s most poignant, heart-breaking music. After two brutal decades of war, the weary Ulysses is washed up on the rocky shore of his home island of Ithaca. There, he discovers the hordes of depraved admirers who have beseiged his faithful wife Penelope in his 20-year absence – and launches into battle to win back her love. Monteverdi’s opera is a celebration of unwavering devotion, conveyed in some of the composer’s most poignant, heartbreaking music. John Eliot Gardiner leads an exemplary cast of world-class singers alongside the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in this live recording from The National Forum of Music in Wroclaw, Poland – part of their critically acclaimed Monteverdi 450 tour in 2017,

"Fifty years ago, Monteverdi epitomized for me all that was most exotic and alluring about Italian music of the early 17th century. His music spoke to audiences so directly: It demanded their attention through its glorious palette of colors and the passionate utterance in which it was couched, whether composed for the church, the chamber, or the theater. I became hooked, much in the same way that many people (myself included) are drawn to the works of his contemporaries: Shakespeare or John Donne, Rubens or Caravaggio—all humanists in the fullest sense of the term. These great creative artists were of a generation that lived through those turbulent, seminal years either side of 1600, a quasi-millennial moment of apocalyptic end-of-times apprehension. It was a theme that surfaces most obviously in Shakespeare’s late plays. Nor was it just the scientists and philosophers who contributed to the ferment of ideas that turned the intellectual life of Europe upside down.

Now, four centuries later, we have an opportunity to bring about a significant breakthrough in public awareness of Monteverdi’s part in this revolution. As good a place to start as any would be by celebrating and recalibrating that astonishing fusion of rich musical beauty with theatrical verisimilitude that is the hallmark of his operas. A fitting 450th- birthday present to Monteverdi, I believe, would then be to put the excitement, and per- haps also the trepidation, back into his music." (John Eliot Gardiner)

Monteverdi Choir
English Baroque Soloists
Sir John Eliot Gardiner, conductor