Most of Monteverdi's motets for one voice were among his late publications, like the celebrated Selva morale e spirituale (Venice, 1640). An aboluste master of what he called the seconda prattica, he demonstrated in these pieces all of the skill he had acquired over the years in writing for the solo voice. Just as he had taken the madrigal to its peak of perfection, Monteverdi here realises the achievements of the Baroque period in this form of religious music inherited from the early centuries of polyphonic writing. The performers have striven to revive the typically Venetian context of the time, placing these sublime works in a framework of instrumental toccatas and sinfonias by his contemporaries Marini, Merulo and Antegnati.

This programme does full justice to the modernity of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (1561-1613), covering both his sacred music and his madrigals. It reproduces all the subtlety and chromaticism of his music, strictly respecting the temperament used in the composer’s time.

La Lingua profetica del Taumaturgo di Paola, San Francesco est un oratorio inédit de Giacomo Antonio Perti (1661-1756). Il a été redécouvert en 2014 par Francesco Lora, un musicologue bolonais, spécialiste de ce compositeur. Cet ouvrage, commandé par le mécène de Perti, Ferdinand de Médicis met en scène trois personnages de la cour de France du 15e siècle : Charles VIII, son épouse Anne de Bretagne et Louise de Savoie.

This is the only recording of sacred music by the extraordinary 17th-century Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi. The Latin works in her collection Sacri Affetti Musicali were entirely suitable for church performance–something Strozzi herself, as a woman outside a convent, was forbidden to do. Most likely she performed these pieces as "spiritual recreation" at meetings of the "Academy of the Unisons" founded by her father, a well-known poet.

Sigismondo d'India, 'nobleman of Palermo', as he called himself, composer, singer and poet, was a true child of dawning century. Like his great contemporary Monteverdi, he succeeded in integrating polyphony into the new monodic style. But it is above all in his Musiche da cantar solo that he showed his measure as an innovator. These madrigals for solo voice, selected from around a hundred works he wrote in this genre, provide dazzling evidence of the fact.