Monferrato: Complete Masses

Natale Monferrato (ca. 1609–85) was maestro di cappella at the ducal church of San Marco, Venice, during 1676–85. An obscure figure of early baroque history, Monferrato (who trained under Claudio Monteverdi, Giovanni Rovetta, and Francesco Cavalli, among others) was, in fact, responsible for restoring discipline and musical standards in a chapel that had long succumbed to secular decay. The type of mass composition most commonly sung at San Marco was the a cappella form, as distinct from the messa concertata. Musicologists have long relied on a small corpus of music—notably containing two works by Monteverdi—for appraising the a cappella style at the seventeenth-century chapel. Significantly, this edition of Monferrato’s complete masses—a total of eight settings from the composer’s opuses 13 and 19—provides a major boost to musical scholarship by presenting the most substantial testimony to the chapel’s daily ritual during the baroque era.