No-one knows better than Rinaldo Alessandrini that Monteverdi's madrigals to which he has dedicated a major part of his work and recordings over the past thirty years were above all texts where the music was the servant, and not the mistress. This form of a cappella vocal polyphony, responding sensitively to the inflections of a highly expressive poetry, was born in the full flowering of Renaissance humanism and developed in the 17th century by composers such as Monteverdi, Marenzio and Gesualdo, before being supplanted by the opera. As the Italian maestro explains, in the Third Book of Madrigals we can already see how carefully the twenty-five-year-old Monteverdi chooses poetry, e.g. by Guarini and Tasso, which is capable of 'responding to the needs of the drama, of truth, humanity and emotionality, culminating at the end of his life in the lustrous triumph of his final works'.