A new opportunity to hear the glorious virtuosity of Roberta Invernizzi comes with this Lamentationi, where the soprano is joined by Franco Pavan’s Laboratorio ’600 in an intimate and intense Passiontide score from mid seventeenth-century Siena: Alessandro Della Ciaia’s set of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Convents throughout Siena at the time boasted nuns of considerable musical talents, both in singing and in playing instruments such as the organ, lute and theorbo, and it is undoubtedly for one such convent that the nobleman Della Ciaia wrote his music for the Holy Weeks matins services. His Lamentations are scored for a solo soprano possessed of a very wide range and capable of meeting his demanding technical effects.

Roberta Invernizzi is the ideal modern-day singer to rise to such spiritual music, and to respond to the text and its description of the grief over the fall of the city of Jerusalem and the terrible fate of its people.

Alessandro Della Ciaia was himself a noted player of the archlute, and his instrumental facility is evident across the lamentations, here performed by harp, archlute, organ and theorbo. Franco Pavan has chosen to intersperse the nine lamentations with toccatas by Michelagnolo Galilei, Claudio Saracini and Vincenzo Bernia as well as Pavan’s own reworking of an appropriate motet by Della Ciaia.