"Brilliant and moving" vocal ensemble Les Canards Chantants and "groundbreaking, gutsy" (Early Music America Magazine) Baroque string band ACRONYM present the first recording of Giovanni Valentini's "Secondo libro de madrigali" (Venice, 1616)—the earliest known madrigal collection to call for instruments other than continuo—exactly four hundred years after its publication. + Giovanni Valentini was born in 1582 in or around Venice. In 1614 he joined the court of the Archduke Ferdinand at Graz, and upon Ferdinand’s 1619 election Vaneltini moved to Vienna to serve as Imperial organist. From the 1620s through the 1640s, Valentini oversaw much of the musical life of Vienna. He was music tutor to the Imperial family and retained his position of Hofkapellmeister under Ferdinand III, who took the throne in 1637.