Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers

Guest Director Avi Stein joins Tesserae to present Monteverdi’s monumental 1610 Vespers, one of the most celebrated works of the early Baroque and a landmark in the history of Western music. Composed at a moment when the expressive new language of the early Baroque was in full development, Monteverdi’s Vespers represents both the culmination of the diverse styles of the late Renaissance polyphony and a showcase for the new expressive and textual devices of the early seventeenth century. The work–a full setting of the music for a Marion Vespers service–combines vocal virtuosity with rich polyphony as well as bold new ways of incorporating instrumental virtuosity.