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GRAMOPHONE (07/2025)
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Reviewer : David Vickers

Monteverdi directed music at a thanksgiving Mass in St Mark’s Basilica at the end of a devastating plague in November 1631. Civic religious venerations also included the Doge laying the foundation stone for the new church of Santa Maria della Salute. It has been conjectured that the repertoire used on this special occasion might be found among the diverse pieces printed a decade later in Monteverdi’s anthology Selva morale e spirituale. Apparently the 1631 Mass had ‘trombe squarciate’ in the Gloria and Credo, and the 1641 publication contains a magnificent concertato seven-part Gloria to which trumpets can be added easily – as Andrew Parrott demonstrated in his fully fledged reconstruction of the ‘Mass of Thanksgiving’ in 1989 (he also included a tolling bell, cannon fire, plainchant and extra-liturgical instrumental sonatas by Monteverdi’s colleagues – Erato, 11/89). Roland Wilson declares ‘no intention … to make a pseudo-liturgical hypothetical reconstruction of one event’ but instead places plausible contenders from Selva morale into a programme ‘more akin to an art exhibition in which two great, large paintings are surrounded by smaller works from the same period by the same artist’.

Bespoke slide trumpets are employed in the bookending start and doxology of the Gloria; La Cappella Ducale’s single voices and Musica Fiata’s assorted instrumentalists cultivate shaded chiaroscuro across enthralling sonorities. Wilson has stitched together a full Credo text using three fragments in Selva morale (‘Crucifixus’, ‘Et resurrexit’ and ‘Et iterum’), parodies of psalms and hymns from the same collection and new Monteverdian pastiche; the editorial experiment is vivified with laudable artistry by rotating combinations of voices and instruments. The four-voice Kyrie, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei are doubled solemnly by trombones and transposed down for all-male ensemble on account of Monteverdi’s chiavette clefs. Plunging leaps in the fiendishly difficult bass motet Ab aeterno ordinata sum are dispatched suavely by Dominik Wörner. Tobias Hunger’s coaxing floridity is echoed from distance sweetly by Johannes Gaubitz in the devotional Salve regina – Audi coelum. Towards the end, Pianto della Madonna – Monteverdi’s own sacred contrafact of Arianna’s lament – is rendered with gorgeous intimacy by Marie Luise Werneburg, melancholic lirone and sensitive job-sharing chitarroni. Proceedings end with the exquisitely sung Laetaniae della Beata Vergine, rearranged discreetly by Wilson from six parts into double four-voice choirs.

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