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 madrigals 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.