Commedia Harmonica by Orazio Vecchi sung by the BBC Midland Singers Conductor, John Lowe
The English version by Edward Dent
Introduced by Alvar Lidell
L'Amfiparnaso is a set of fourteen madrigals, grave and gay, depicting various episodes, sentimental or ribald, in the lives of some of the stock pantomime characters of the Commedia dell' arte. The spectacle of which I speak, wrote Vecchi in 1597 in a prologue to the work, ' is seen through the mind, into which it enters through the ears, not through the eyes.'