Vocal ensemble Cantanti DAI MONTI VERDI was founded in 2017 by Severin Vasilev and specialises in the performance of early music, mainly from the XVI and XVII centuries, with a particular focus on the madrigal. The young singers of the ensemble have rich and varied experience as soloists, chamber musicians and choristers both at home and abroad. The ensemble regularly collaborates with eminent Bulgarian early music instrumentalists and experts.
Throughout the 2017/2018 concert season, supported by the National Culture Fund of Bulgaria, as well as the Danish embassy and the National Academy of Music in Sofia, the ensemble celebrated the 450 anniversary of the birth of Claudio Monteverdi with concert programmes and recordings of madrigals and motets by the eminent composer and his contemporaries.
In 2019, as part of the ppIANISSIMO festival, Cantanti DAI MONTI VERDI made their first foray in contemporary music by performing works by Japanese composers and premiering the madrigal Hakucho no uta by Somei Satoh /b. 1947/ commissioned for the ensemble by Severin Vasilev.
Following a lull in the ensemble’s activities brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022, Cantanti DAI MONTI VERDI experienced a ‘renaissance’ of their own returning to the stage reborn in a new line-up and at the same time retracing their roots in early music with two distinct programmes. The first revolved around the chromatic music of Carlo Gesualdo and Michelangelo Rossi presented at a concert in the Aula of the Sofia University on 23 May 2022, celebrating 80 years since the founding of Italian Philology at the university, while the second programme is devoted exclusively to the Oltremontani, the composers ‘from over the Alps’ of the Franco-Flemish School, focusing on Belgian-born Giaches de Wert, his colleagues, predecessors and successors. Concerts took place once more in the Aula of the Sofia University on 29 October and 8 November as part of the Sofia Baroque Arts Festival.
Cantanti DAI MONTI VERDI now look forward to 2023, when they are set to host an international masterclass in Sofia and continue to explore the music of the Oltremontani in a series of concerts.
‘Their balance subtly fuses a sparingly used vibrato, flexible singing of the counterpoint, skilful and varied agogics, and poetically sculpted phrasing with a stylistically precise ending that fades into silence.’ – (Ekaterina Docheva, DECRESCENDO, 29.05.2022)