E-Mail This Article to a Friend New styles A glimpse into Monteverdi’s world, plus Yundi Li BY DAVID WEININGER

Often the best concerts are those that show composers taking part in and responding to the challenges and innovations their eras presented. In them, we hear not only great music but history itself, in a process of development and change. The Boston Museum Trio has such a program planned for next weekend as it devotes the third in its series of concerts at the Museum of Fine Arts to "Monteverdi’s World."

Focusing on music of the early 17th century, this concert is "meant to paint a picture of the some of the musical activity around that time," says Trio violinist Daniel Stepner over the phone. (The other members are viola da gamba player Laura Jeppesen and harpsichordist John Gibbons.) "There was kind of a very radical shift in musical thinking right in the middle of Monteverdi’s life." Said stylistic change, coming around 1600, involved a movement away from harmonically lush polyphony toward a simpler musical canvas. "That sort of whittling down to three or two voices was one of the radical ideas of the time," Stepner continues. "Previously, the texture de rigueur was five or six voices. And I think it was a kind of thinning out of the texture so there could be more versatility for each voice, more virtuosity, and more texture for composition." And this paring down of the sound allowed the text to be better understood and dramatized. "Monteverdi was very much in the camp of ‘the text comes first, the music second.’ "

The most direct fruit of the new style was the creation of opera, a development for which the composer is routinely given sole credit. Indeed, the operas are the route by which most of us get to know Monteverdi. But the new art form also left its mark on his last two books of madrigals (the seventh and eighth), selections from which are at the center of the Trio’s concert. The madrigals, Stepner explains, "are sort of his sketchbooks for the operas. It’s like the cantata is to the opera in Handel. Handel’s cantatas, of which there are hundreds, are really opera scenes. Something of that is true too in late Monteverdi." But the madrigals aren’t merely preliminary studies, he points out. "They’re forging new musical forms at the same time, they’re experimenting with accompanying instruments. It’s a very fertile time, a lot of imagination — a sort of hothouse of musical activity, both instrumental and vocal."

Asked about a favorite among the madrigals, Stepner points to "Mentre vaga Angioletta," which he calls "a fantastically written thing. It’s two guys singing the praises of a woman — they praise her singing, her looks, and her voice. And what they do is to imitate what she can do with her voice, and it’s a kind of catalogue of vocal possibilities. And there are all these wonderful metaphors in Italian, and it all translates into English." That madrigal, like the others, is written for two tenors, and will be sung by two of Boston’s best-known singers: Frank Kelley and William Hite.

To fill out the portrait, Stepner and company will include a generous selection of instrumental and vocal works of Monteverdi’s contemporaries, who include Giovanni Cima (the first composer to publish trio sonatas), Girolamo Frescobaldi, and Alessandro Stradella. There are also a few works from later in the 17th century, and Stepner points in particular to a work by Giovanni Battista Mazzaferrata. The interesting thing about it, he says, is that "it’s much more normal-sounding than anything else on the program. It’s very beautiful, but it makes you realize just how wild things had been before."

The Boston Museum Trio presents "Monteverdi’s World" at the Museum of Fine Arts next Thursday, April 8, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $24, $20 for museum members; call (617) 369-3306.

WATCH OUT, LANG LANG! There’s competition afoot already, as another young Chinese-born virtuoso pianist begins making the rounds. Yundi Li won the quinquennial Warsaw International Chopin competition four years ago, when he was all of 18, and he’s one of a number of young artists (including Lang) that the venerable Deutsche Grammophon label has signed in an effort to make itself look less venerable and more cutting-edge. He’ll touch down in Boston next Saturday, April 10, for a Jordan Hall recital sponsored by the Chinese Arts Exchange that features Chopin’s four Scherzi and Liszt’s B-minor Sonata. That’s at 8 p.m., and tickets are $36 to $51; call (617) 527-1428.