Madrigali erotici e spirituali

This is an imaginative album of madrigals. Aquilino Coppini, a muscian and lyricist, created sets of contrafacta of Monteverdi's secular madrigals. The secular originals, which are sometimes quite erotic, are transformed into spiritual and devotional works. Coppini did more than merely shove the words into place, but instead carefully retranslated the text. This album pairs the secular and sacred versions together, interrupted in the sequence of tracks by "Pianto della madonna". Two of the pairings take contrafacta published in editions by Ambrosius Profe ("Heu bone vir" and "Longe, mi Jesu").

Monteverdi himself wrote a contrafactum. He took his composition of 1607, "Lamento d'Arianna", and published a lament of Mary over Jesus in "Selva morale e spirituale". Later he developed a polyphonic version of the lament of Arianna, published in the sixth book of madrigals (1614). Emma Kirkby and the Consort of Musicke together created a contrafactum of the polyphonic version based on Monteverdi's own transformation of the 1607 composition. The resulting fourth composition, "Pianto della madonna", is presented in this album.