Monteverdi: Il secondo libro de madrigali, 1590

La Venexiana’s cast for Book 2 is virtually identical to Concerto Italiano’s a decade earlier. Here La Venexiana has the edge. Concerto Italiano zipped through the whole book in just under an hour; given that the same singers take more than 10 minutes longer in the new version it’s perhaps surprising that the two approaches don’t sound more different. Claudio Cavina doesn’t fragment the text in the manner of his rival, but his more leisurely readings generate a more effective charge by lingering over Monteverdi’s climactic build-ups (as in the last line of Mentr’io mirava fiso, to mention just one instance), and he has the edge on intonation. The Gramophone Classical Music Guide