Welcome to our 2019–2020 Season
Explorations
Explorations
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Dances from Renaissance & Baroque Spain Presented by the Indianapolis Early Music Festival, Indianapolis, IN |
Friday, June 12, 2020 Join us on opening night of the 2020 Indianapolis Early Music Festival. With guest, Esteban La Rotta, plucked strings |
Image © Paula Lobo
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Women's Voices: Early Modern Women Composers in Context Presented by Friends of Chamber Music, Troy, NY |
Saturday, April 4, 2020, 7:30PM Pre-concert lecture by Elizabeth Weinfield Kiggins Auditorium, Slocum Hall, Emma Willard School 285 Pauling Avenue, Troy, NY |
The Viola da Gamba Player, c. 1630–1640, by Bernardo Strozzi (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden)
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La Paix du Parnasse: French and Italian masterworks of the Baroque Presented by The Duke University Collection of Musical Instruments and the "Rare Music" concert series |
Tuesday, February 18, 2020, 7:30 PM Von der Heyden Studio Theater, Rubinstein Arts Center, Duke University Free Admission |
Italian and French musical fashions wrestled for dominance in Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sonnambula violinist Jude Ziliak and gambist Amy Domingues, joined by guest harpsichordist Gabriel Benton, will present a rich sampling of each nation’s most characteristic offerings, from the fiery and idiosyncratic works of the little-known Nicola Matteis to the sublime pathos of Couperin’s chamber music for Louis XIV.
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El Laurel de Apolo: Zarzuela from the Baroque to the New World Presented by Houston Early Music, Houston, TX |
Friday, January 31, 2020, 7:30 PM Christ Church Cathedral 1117 Texas Avenue Houston, TX 77002 Pre-concert talk by Sonnambula at 6:45 PM |
Gustave Doré (1832-1883), Une scène du Tio Caniyitas, Zarzuela de M. Soriano Fuentes, Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1874
The Palacio de la Zarzuela, a royal hunting lodge just outside Madrid, takes its name from the brambly thicket of woods on which it stands. Beginning in 1657, a new genre of musical drama was performed there, including Calderón de la Barca’s El Laurel de Apolo — featuring a blend of elevated spoken verse with rustic folk music, dances, and imitations of Italian opera. This new genre, called “zarzuela,” also references the wild, tangled vegetation around which it was born, a crown of laurels on Spain’s musical history. Join us on a journey through the some of the most scintillating moments in Baroque zarzuela and contemporaneous dramatic pieces from the Latin world.
The Palacio de la Zarzuela, a royal hunting lodge just outside Madrid, takes its name from the brambly thicket of woods on which it stands. Beginning in 1657, a new genre of musical drama was performed there, including Calderón de la Barca’s El Laurel de Apolo — featuring a blend of elevated spoken verse with rustic folk music, dances, and imitations of Italian opera. This new genre, called “zarzuela,” also references the wild, tangled vegetation around which it was born, a crown of laurels on Spain’s musical history. Join us on a journey through the some of the most scintillating moments in Baroque zarzuela and contemporaneous dramatic pieces from the Latin world.
with Camille Zamora, soprano and Esteban La Rotta, vihuela
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Sounding the Dutch Baroque A Musical Kunstkammer Selections from ‘T Uitnement Kabinet (1646; 1649) Presented by The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City |
Friday, November 22, 2019, 6/7 PM The Metropolitan Museum of Art Robert Lehman Court 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY FREE with Museum admission |
David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in His Gallery at Brussels, 1651, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
This concert will reflect on the theme of the Musical Kunstkammer, or collector's cabinet, in conjunction with The Met's current exhibition, In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met. Musical performances were an integral feature of the early modern Kunstkammer in the Low Countries, events in which many Dutch mercantile families, and notably women, were crucial participants. Portraits were often displayed in the home next to instruments and other collected ephemera, and together they were meant to inspire a sense of wonder in the viewer. As with the material objects displayed, musical ability, too, was on view. These performances will draw from the seventeenth-century musical collection, ‘T Uitnement Kabinet (“From The Cabinet”), a collection of two- and three-part instrumental music that plays with the conceit of the art cabinet. Published by Paulus Matthysz in Amsterdam (1646 and 1649), it features work by Dutch, Flemish, German, Italian, and French composers written between ca. 1590–1667. We hope that hearing this music in intimate galleries of The Met will bring to light the performative notion that live music, like art, was a wondrous thing in the Baroque period to observe and contemplate.
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Sound Carving: Sacred and Profane Music of the Austrian Baroque Presented by BPAC, New York City |
Friday, October 11, 2019 at 7:30 PM Baruch Performing Arts Center Engelman Recital Hall 55 Lexington Ave, New York, NY |
Riemenschneider
Austrian and German composers at the end of the seventeenth century developed a highly original style, infused with mysticism — haunted by memories of the Thirty Years’ War and the Siege of Vienna. Exploratory and robust, this sound is marked by extravagant harmonic experimentation and fanciful instrumental virtuosity. Join us for a journey through this intricate and mesmerizing sound world.
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Leonora Duarte (1610–78): Converso Composer in Antwerp Presented by Early Music Ann Arbor Ann Arbor, Michigan |
Friday, September 20, 2019, 8PM Congregational Church of Birmingham 1000 Cranbrook Road, Bloomfield Hills pre-concert lecture by Elizabeth Weinfield, 7:15PM Saturday, September 21, 2019, 8PM St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church 306 N. Division Street, Ann Arbor pre-concert lecture by Elizabeth Weinfield, 7:15PM |
World Map, Amsterdam, 1862, T'Amsterdam Gedruckt by G. van Schagen
To celebrate the launch of our new recording, this program features the music of Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), a Jewish Converso living in Antwerp who composed seven Sinfonias for viol consort — the only known seventeenth-century viol music written by a woman. The music is testament to a formidable talent for composition. Born in Antwerp to a prominent family of merchants and art collectors (friends of the keyboard -making Ruckers family, and possibly Vermeer and Rubens), Duarte received a superb musical education that included instruction on harpsichord, lute, and viol, as well as lessons in composition. Duarte’s musical evenings at home with her siblings quickly became well-known ports of call for traveling diplomats and literati, among them Constantijn Huygens, Dutch poet Anna Roemers Visscher, composer Nicholas Lanier, and singer Anne de la Barre. Both a Jew and a woman, Duarte received no commissions from church or court; thus the existence of the Sinfonias presents a remarkable opportunity for us to consider music within the domestic sphere. In this performance, we invite you to consider Duarte’s extant works as products of her interactions with a vibrant, urban community; as vital testimony to the cultural accomplishments of women Converso in early modern Europe; and as evidence of a complex and symbiotic relationship with her male contemporaries, some of whom will also be played, among them the English composer, John Bull (1562/3–1628), director of music at Antwerp cathedral and very possibly one of her tutors.