La Venexiana

This marvelous Italian vocal ensemble is dedicated to the performance of early music, mostly of the Renaissance era. Founded from a collaboration between soprano Rossana Bertini and the group's musical director, countertenor Claudio Cavina, the group adopted its name from the anonymous Renaissance comedy La Venexiana, a work of special importance in Italian theater for its commentary on all levels of society, which is expressed in combinations of high Italian and various dialects. In this same manner, the warm, Mediterranean-spirited La Venexiana ensemble maintains a wide-ranging spectrum of language subtleties in its musical interpretations and mixes and contrasts aspects of so-called refined and popular genres. The group's award-winning recorded repertoire ranges from the exquisite and harmonically surprising shifts of the Quarto libro di Madrigali (Fourth Book of Madrigals) by the always controversial Carlo Gesualdo; madrigals by Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Luca Marenzio, Claudio Monteverdi, and 17th-century woman composer Barbara Strozzi, to music by Handel and Vivaldi. The ensemble's recent tours have taken it throughout Italy, Germany, and Slovakia to participate in important festivals of early music. Later recordings include Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (2007) and Marenzio's Sesto Libro de Madrigali (2011).