Published in 1641, Claudio Monteverdi’s Selva morale e spirituale stands as the culminating monument of his sacred music, composed during his final years as maestro di cappella at the Basilica of San Marco in Venice. Neither a unified cycle nor a conventional liturgical setting, the collection gathers psalms, motets, Mass movements, and spiritual madrigals that embody Monteverdi’s mature synthesis of the stile antico and the expressive concertato idiom.

At the heart of this program are selections from the Selva, heard alongside sacred works by Alessandro Grandi and Giovanni Rovetta, two composers closely connected with Monteverdi and the musical life of seventeenth-century Venice. Grandi helped define the new, intensely expressive sacred concerto in the years immediately preceding Monteverdi’s Selva, while Rovetta, Monteverdi’s colleague and eventual successor at San Marco, carried that tradition into the next generation. Together, these works offer a portrait of Venetian sacred music at the height of its creative flowering, where technical brilliance, rhetorical power, and profound spiritual expression came together in service of the liturgy.

Performers

Andréa Walker and Elizabeth Tait soprano
Michael Skarke alto
Aaron Cates and Michaël Hudetz tenor
Peter Schoellkopff bass

Manami Mizumoto concertmaster
Will Copeland violin
Sydney ZumMallen violone

Daniel Swenberg theorbo
Bryan Anderson organ

Mario Aschauer artistic director