Delitiae Musicae & Marco Longhini - Monteverdi: Madrigals Book 2 (2003)

Delitiae Musicae is an Italian vocal ensemble that specializes in the madrigals of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. The group has recorded large numbers of madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi and Don Carlo Gesualdo and has also explored the large unpublished repertory of choral and vocal music from this period.

Delitiae Musicae, often stylized as Delitiæ Musicæ, was founded in 1992 by conductor Marco Longhini, a conducting graduate of the Conservatorio di Musica ‘Giuseppe Verdi’ di Milano who had become interested in the music of the 16th and 17th centuries and decided to form a group of his own to explore the field. (There is a lute duo from Spain that is also named Delitiae Musicae but is unrelated.) The new group, based in Verona, soon found bookings around Europe, especially at summer festivals, including the Monteverdi Festival in Cremona, Italy, the San Maurizio festival in Milan, and the Utrecht Festival. It has performed and recorded both a cappella and vocal-instrumental repertory.

Longhini and the group have carried out a good deal of musicological research, unearthing, performing, and recording obscure and unpublished 16th century music such as the Missa Philomena Praevia by Philippe Verdelot, four widely acclaimed albums dedicated to masses by Palestrina based on the music of Lupus Hellinck, and works by Jacquet de Mantua. Several Delitiae Musicae recordings in this vein won major recording-industry awards in the late 1990s. Later in its career, Delitiae Musicae turned predominantly to the madrigal, recording the rarely heard madrigal comedy La Pazzia Senile of Adriano Banchieri for the Stradivarius label in 2000. Since then, the group has recorded mostly for Naxos, issuing large cycles of the madrigals of Monteverdi, and concurrently, Gesualdo. In 2019, Delitiae Musicae recorded Monteverdi's Ninth Book of Madrigals for Naxos, pairing them with the composer's 1607 set of Scherzi Musicali. ~ James Manheim