Claudio Cavina
Claudio Cavina was one of the most important and influential Italian counter-tenors of his generation and a distinguished director of vocal and instrumental ensembles. Born in Castrocaro Terme e Terra del Sole (in the Italian province of Forlì-Cesena, part of the region of Emilia-Romagna) in 1962, he began his vocal studies in nearby Bologna with Candace Smith, and continued his training with Kurt Widmer and René Jacobs at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland.
As the impetus of the modern early music revival gathered pace in the later 1980s, especially in Italy, Cavina became an in-demand interpreter with leading ensembles such as La Colombina, and Concerto Italiano, relishing the opportunities to perform and record reappraisals of known repertory and proudly project exciting discoveries of the unknown from the past.
The founding of La Venexiana in 1995 provided the opportunity for this distinctive vocal talent to embrace directing activities; with La Venexiana, Cavina embarked upon an award-winning series of the nine books of madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi, his three principal operas, and sacred music – such as the Vespro della Beata Vergine and the Selva morale e spirituale. Glossa was in the happy position to release such recordings as well as a dizzying array of collections of other composers of monody from Italy. Added to all these were dramatic music from Cavalli and a “jazz-ified” recital of Monteverdi.
Claudio Cavina’s concert activities reflected this broad range of composers, with the productions of Monteverdi's L’Orfeo, L’incoronazione di Poppea and Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria being given in a series of European performances in Jerez de la Frontera, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, Modena, Genova, Krakow, Bucharest, Melk, Regensburg, London, St. Gallen and Lyon.
Claudio Cavina died in Forlì on August 30, 2020. He had suffered a debilitating stroke in 2016.
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La Venexiana
La Venexiana takes its name from an anonymous Renaissance comedy, one of the cardinal points of reference in Italian theatre both for its use of language, a combination of Italian and dialect, and for its acute rendering of a society and its manners. In styling itself after this glorious tradition, today’s La Venexiana aims to incorporate into its musical interpretations an attention to language in all of its subtlety, and an exultation of contrasts between the refined and the popular, the sacred and the profane. This ensemble has established a new style in Italian early music performance: a warm, truly Mediterranean blend of textual declamation, rhetorical colour and harmonic refinement. Born of the collaboration between soprano Rossana Bertini and counter-tenor Claudio Cavina, La Venexiana makes a careful use of the original sources, keeping the activity of the ensemble always stimulating and full of enjoyable surprises.
La Venexiana’s recording collaboration with Glossa began in 1998 and has seen much-acclaimed interpretations of Monteverdi’s operas cap the achievements of the group’s Monteverdi Edition. In addition, the madrigals of Sigismondo d’India, Giaches de Wert, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Luca Marenzio and Gesualdo da Venosa have all contributed to the ensemble’s performing and recording fame (and it has been the recipient of many awards such as two Gramophone Awards and a Cannes Classical Award among others).
The members of La Venexiana are some of the most experienced European performers in the early music field. They have sung together in the most famous festivals and concert series throughout the world: from the Musikverein in Vienna to De Singel in Antwerp, from the Bruges Festival to Barcelona, Brussels, Utrecht, Strasbourg, Amiens, passing through San Sebastián, Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, Bogotá, San Francisco, Tucson, San Diego, Seattle, they have everywhere been highly praised. Despite the tragic loss of Claudio Cavina, the ensemble is minded to continue with its performing activities.
The remarkable journey of Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana through and with the music of Claudio Monteverdi... which, of course, has taken in along its way the madrigals, L’Orfeo, L’incoronazione di Poppea, the Selva morale e spirituale and the ensemble’s own modern and popular ‘twist’ on the Cremonese genius in ’Round M – now comes to rest on Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, the penultimate surviving dramatic work by Monteverdi, which was given its first performance in the Venice Carnival of 1640. Along the way, Claudio Cavina has developed a ‘sixth sense’ for recognizing and interpreting Monteverdi’s style and the result, in this new recording made in Mondovì in Italy, captures perfectly the spirit of the fledgling Venetian operatic world which Monteverdi was helping to encourage.[read more...]
It is not only discerning music lovers around the globe who are giving a warm welcome to the recordings which are being published on Glossa; critical approval in the specialist media has been joining in as well. One example of the latter is the newly-instigated International Classical Music Awards (ICMA) which, for its inaugural 2011 edition, has chosen no less than nine of Glossa’s recent releases in its initial nominations. [read more...]
En Glossa estamos muy orgullosos de poder aplaudir, una vez más, el talento musical de nuestros artistas, cuyas espléndidas grabaciones recibieron en 2008 un especial apoyo por parte de la crítica internacional, que no es sino el reflejo palpable de las reacciones de otros muchos amantes del sello. En septiembre de 2008, Claudio Cavina de La Venexiana recibió su segundo Gramophone Award en Londres, cuando su grabación de L’Orfeo de Monteverdi fue premiado con el galardón a la mejor grabación vocal barroca. [leer más...]
Not for the first time in their illustrious career, Claudio Cavina and his Italian vocal and instrumental ensemble La Venexiana have just received a strong critical vote of approval for their artistry, with the announcement on Thursday September 25th that they have won a coveted Classic fM Gramophone Award. Claudio Cavina was on hand to collect the Baroque Vocal Award for 2008 (decided on by the specialist critics of the UK-based Gramophone magazine) at a ceremony held in London, UK for his and La Venexiana’s recording of the fabula in musica by Claudio Monteverdi, L’Orfeo.[read more...]
“I really do not think that there is one composer who can be rightly compared to this genius.”
In completing their masterful Monteverdi Edition, Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana have returned to the beginning – to the Madrigali a cinque voci… Libro primo – of Monteverdi’s exploration of the madrigalian art form, a journey which was to occupy the composer for more than 50 years of his life across his staying in the cities of Cremona, Mantua and Venice. In this First Book, published in 1587 when the composer was barely 20 years old yet demonstrably showing clear evidence of his approaching maturity, La Venexiana’s performances are again faithful to Monteverdi’s passion for the written word – above all to the weight theme of love. In this final release in the Monteverdi Edition Cavina adds a twist in the tail by including on this new CD the madrigals from the posthumous Libro Nono put together by the composer’s Venetian publisher. With the rerelease of La Venexiana’s recording of Il Terzo Libro (complete with a new essay penned by Stefano Russomanno), eight volumes now comprise Glossa’s Monteverdi Edition, all available within the attractively and imaginatively unified design style which has become the hallmark of the label. [read more...]