While La Venexiana are still on tour taking their successful Monteverdi L’Orfeo half way around the world and are also getting ready to make new recordings of great importance for Glossa, we here are in the process of completing a collection which has already become an undeniable reference point in this field: the Monteverdi Edition, which covers the entirety of the madrigals, composed by Claudio Monteverdi during the course of his life and published in nine books, the last of them being posthumous. Right now, it is the turn of the Fifth Book to be issued, while in a few months time we willrelease the two final remaining volumes. According to Stefano Russomanno in his as everexcellent notes for this collection, “Monteverdi’s Fifth Book of Madrigals is a pivotal work. From its height it is possible to survey in a single glance the history of the madrigal, its previous and subsequent stages. On the one hand, the new collection replicates the miraculous poetic balance of the Third Book; on the other, it presses ahead even more radically along the novel lines presented in the Fourth Book. [...] Even more striking and emblematic of the new era is the presence of the basso continuo, which is mandatory in the last six madrigals of the Fifth Book and optional in the rest. [...] The door leading to drama and the representative style was now open. Monteverdi would not be long in crossing it: two years later, L’Orfeo would come to light.” And there is nobody better than La Venexiana to uncover for us the fascinating evolution of Italian music at one of its greatest moments...