Giovanni Antonio Rigatti and Giovanni Rovetta were the most important composers at St Mark’s in the period immediately after Monteverdi’s death in 1643. Rigatti was a Venetian, and served at St Mark’s for his entire career apart from a short time at Udine in the 1630s; he died in 1649 while still in his early thirties. His settings of Psalm 4,
Cum invocarem, and the Nunc dimittis come from a collection of music for Compline, published in 1646. As these pieces show, Rigatti was a master of the Monteverdi style, and, like Monteverdi, used instrumental ritornelli in a creative way to articulate and give shape to often disparate and diffuse vocal sections.
from notes by Peter Holman © 2001
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